Mental health statistics increasingly sound alarming.
More young people report anxiety and depression. More adults describe themselves as struggling psychologically. Diagnoses of conditions including ADHD and autism have risen, while employers, schools and governments are dealing with growing demand for mental-health support.
It would be easy to conclude that society is simply becoming much more mentally ill.
The reality is more complicated.
Recent evidence suggests that psychological distress really has increased, particularly among younger people. At the same time, reduced stigma, broader mental-health vocabulary and changes in how people interpret emotional difficulties are influencing what gets reported, diagnosed and treated. The debate explored by the Financial Times therefore matters because changing language can blur the line between serious psychiatric illness, psychological distress and the normal—but painful—difficulties of being human.
The question is no longer whether mental health matters.
It is whether society is measuring it accurately enough to help the people who need support most.
The Increase in Distress Is Not Imaginary
Arguments about overdiagnosis can sometimes create the impression that the mental-health crisis is largely invented.
The data do not support such a simple conclusion.
The OECD’s major 2026 review of youth mental health found worsening indicators across most countries where comparable evidence was available. Of 11 countries with useful time-series data, nine showed annual average declines in youth mental-health status of between 3% and 16% from 2012 to 2022. Twenty-eight of 29 clinicians and policymakers interviewed by the OECD also believed young people’s mental health had deteriorated.
England shows a similar pattern.
The latest NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey found that common mental-health conditions among people aged 16 to 24 increased from 18.9% in 2014 to 25.8% in 2023-24. Among working-age adults overall, prevalence increased from 18.9% to 22.6% across the same period. Severe symptoms rose too, suggesting that the trend cannot be explained solely by people becoming more willing to describe mild unhappiness as a mental-health problem.
Worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates that more than a billion people are living with mental-health conditions, with anxiety and depression among the most common.
Something significant is happening.
But identifying exactly what is happening requires more precision.
“Mental Health” Now Covers an Enormous Range of Experiences
One difficulty is terminology.
A person experiencing schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder or incapacitating depression clearly has very different clinical needs from someone feeling stressed before exams or anxious about his job.
Yet everyday language may place all of those experiences under the same phrase: “mental-health problems.”
That can be helpful because it reduces stigma.
It can also obscure severity.
The WHO defines a mental disorder as involving clinically significant disturbance in cognition, emotional regulation or behaviour, usually associated with meaningful impairment in functioning. The OECD estimates that about 21% of people across its member countries experienced a mental disorder in 2023.
Feeling lonely, worried, sad or overwhelmed does not automatically satisfy that definition.
Those emotions can still be extremely unpleasant and deserve support. The distinction simply matters because policymakers must know whether they are responding to increased diagnosed illness, increased distress or both.
If every form of discomfort is treated as equivalent, limited clinical resources can become harder to target effectively.
Better Awareness Has Changed What People Report
There has also been a remarkable cultural change.
Mental illness was historically surrounded by considerable shame. People concealed symptoms. Families avoided discussing diagnoses. Employees feared that disclosing difficulties could damage their careers.
That stigma has declined.
Young people now possess far greater mental-health literacy and are often more comfortable describing anxiety, depression, neurodivergence or psychological distress.
The OECD specifically warns that improved awareness and greater willingness to disclose symptoms can influence survey trends. Experts interviewed for its 2026 review nevertheless believed that this reporting effect exists alongside a genuine increase in distress rather than fully explaining it.
That distinction is crucial.
More diagnoses can simultaneously mean two things.
Society may be identifying conditions that were previously missed.
And the underlying prevalence of certain problems may actually be increasing.
Those explanations do not cancel each other out.
The Danger Is Medicalising Every Difficult Experience
The harder debate begins when ordinary adversity increasingly receives clinical language.
People experience breakups.
Children struggle at school.
Workers become exhausted.
Teenagers worry about friendships and appearance.
Grief follows bereavement.
Anxiety can occur before an important decision.
None of these experiences is pleasant. But human beings have always experienced distress without every episode representing psychiatric disease.
If society increasingly interprets difficult emotions primarily through medical categories, people may begin believing that discomfort itself is evidence something is clinically wrong.
That could have unintended consequences.
Someone experiencing temporary distress may begin defining himself around a diagnosis rather than viewing the problem as a difficult but potentially manageable period of life.
At the same time, dismissing symptoms as “normal” can be equally dangerous when someone genuinely has a serious condition.
The challenge is not choosing between medicalisation and denial.
It is distinguishing appropriately between them.
Social and Economic Conditions Matter More Than Any Single App
Smartphones and social media frequently become the obvious suspects in discussions about youth mental health.
There is evidence worth taking seriously. WHO data found that 11% of adolescents surveyed across Europe, Central Asia and Canada displayed signs of problematic social-media behaviour, with girls reporting higher rates than boys.
But blaming screens alone oversimplifies the problem.
The OECD’s 2026 review concluded that evidence regarding digital technology does not provide one simple explanation. Instead, experts identified multiple interacting pressures, including economic insecurity, academic pressure, bullying, family circumstances, climate anxiety, global conflict and social disadvantage.
England’s own data demonstrate how strongly mental health relates to material circumstances.
Common mental-health conditions affected 26.2% of people living in the most deprived fifth of areas compared with 16% in the least deprived fifth. Among people with problem debt, prevalence reached 39%, more than double the rate among people without problem debt.
Sometimes what appears to be a purely psychological problem has an economic environment underneath it.
Young Women Appear Particularly Affected
One of the most consistent patterns concerns girls and young women.
The OECD found that girls and older adolescents generally report poorer mental health than boys and younger children. Among 15-year-old girls surveyed in 2022, 45.4% reported feeling low more than once a week, compared with 28.6% in 2014. Hospitalisations for self-harm among girls also increased across several countries.
This cannot easily be dismissed as terminology alone.
Serious self-harm and functional impairment are harder indicators than simply asking whether someone sometimes feels anxious.
At the same time, suicide trends among young people have not risen consistently across all OECD countries, demonstrating why different measures can tell different stories.
Mental-health trends therefore resist a single dramatic headline.
Some indicators are deteriorating sharply.
Others are more stable.
A Diagnosis Can Become the Gateway to Help
There is another structural problem.
Schools, workplaces and welfare systems often require formal diagnoses before someone can receive adjustments or specialized support.
That creates an incentive to obtain a label.
Someone may genuinely need additional time during examinations, workplace accommodation or educational assistance, but access can depend on proving he has a recognized condition.
The system can therefore unintentionally encourage people to pursue diagnoses because diagnosis functions as a ticket to support.
That does not mean the diagnosis is fraudulent.
It means the institutional structure can increase demand for diagnostic assessment.
A better system might sometimes provide appropriate help based on functional need rather than forcing everyone through an increasingly congested clinical pathway.
Overdiagnosis and Undertreatment Can Exist at the Same Time
This is perhaps the most important contradiction.
A healthcare system can simultaneously diagnose some people too readily while failing to treat seriously ill people adequately.
There is nothing inconsistent about that.
If growing numbers of people with moderate distress enter specialist services, waiting lists become longer.
Someone with severe depression, psychosis or another disabling illness may then wait alongside a much broader population seeking help.
The solution is not simply to tell people they are fine.
Nor is it to provide every person experiencing distress with the same level of psychiatric intervention.
The OECD argues for more accessible, lower-threshold support alongside properly resourced specialist services, allowing young people to receive help without requiring every problem to become a formal diagnosis first.
That may offer a more sustainable middle ground.
So What Is Really Going On With Mental Health?
The uncomfortable answer is that several things are happening simultaneously.
Mental-health awareness has improved.
Stigma has fallen.
People are more willing to report symptoms.
Diagnostic language has entered everyday culture.
Some ordinary distress may increasingly be medicalised.
But beneath all of that, there is also credible evidence of genuine deterioration, particularly among younger people and especially among girls and disadvantaged groups.
The mistake is searching for one explanation.
It is probably not simply smartphones.
It is not simply overdiagnosis.
It is not simply Covid.
And it is not simply that younger generations have become less resilient.
Mental health reflects the interaction between biology, family, work, education, economics, community, technology and culture.
That complexity creates a difficult policy challenge.
If society exaggerates every episode of distress into illness, it risks frightening people unnecessarily and overwhelming clinical services.
If it swings too far in the opposite direction, genuinely ill people may again be dismissed and left without help.
The goal should therefore be neither to diagnose everyone nor to tell everyone to toughen up.
It should be to use clearer language, provide support earlier and reserve intensive clinical treatment for those whose symptoms and impairment genuinely require it.
Mental-health awareness was an important achievement.
The next step is learning how to talk about mental health without making every painful emotion a disorder and without overlooking the people whose suffering really is one.
