Is Mental Health Awareness Making Us More Anxious? A Fair Look at the Evidence

Mental health awareness has done real good, reducing stigma and making it easier to ask for help, but a growing number of researchers argue it may also be teaching some people to read ordinary distress as disorder. So is mental health awareness making us more anxious? Not awareness itself. The risk lies in a particular version of it, one that turns every hard feeling into a diagnosis and every bad week into something to monitor.

This is a careful argument, and it needs to be made carefully. Nothing here is a case against therapy, medication or taking mental illness seriously. People who struggle deserve care, not skepticism. The question is narrower and more uncomfortable: what happens when the language built to help the people who need it most spreads to everyone, for everything?

The paradox hiding in plain sight

Gen Z is the most fluent generation in the history of mental health vocabulary. Triggered, boundaries, dysregulated, trauma response, burnout. It is also the generation reporting the most distress.

The American Psychological Association's 2018 Stress in America survey found that 27% of Gen Z adults rated their mental health as fair or poor, compared with 15% of millennials, 13% of Gen Xers and 7% of boomers. The same survey found Gen Z was the most likely to have received therapy or treatment from a mental health professional, at 37%.

Both of those numbers can be good news and bad news at once. More young people are seeking help, which is exactly what decades of anti-stigma work hoped for. And more young people say they are struggling. A survey cannot tell us why. It cannot separate genuine increases in suffering from better reporting, or from something stranger: the possibility that the way we talk about distress is shaping how distress is experienced.

What did mental health awareness get right?

Start with what worked, because it matters.

Graham Thornicroft and colleagues at King's College London reviewed the global evidence on stigma reduction in The Lancet in 2016. At the population level, they found a fairly consistent pattern of short-term improvements in attitudes, with some lesser evidence for gains in knowledge. Social contact, meaning direct interaction with people who have lived experience of mental illness, was the most effective type of intervention in the short term. The evidence for longer-term benefit was weak, and the field had few large, strong studies.

That is a modest but real result. Stigma has historically kept people with serious conditions away from treatment, and anything that shifts it is worth defending. If you grew up in a family where depression was called laziness and anxiety was called weakness, you know what silence costs.

The critique that follows is not a call to go back.

How "mental disorder" quietly expanded

In 2016, the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam published a paper in Psychological Inquiry that gave this trend a name: concept creep. He traced how a set of psychological concepts, including abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction and prejudice, had expanded over the decades in two directions. Outward, to cover new kinds of experience. And downward, to cover milder cases.

Some of that expansion was overdue. Recognizing emotional abuse, or trauma outside combat, helped real people. But Haslam's conclusion was ambivalent. Concept creep, he argued, runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience.

You can hear it in ordinary speech. A stressful week becomes "my anxiety." A disappointing conversation becomes "trauma." Needing a quiet evening becomes "my social battery is depleted." Some of these phrases are genuinely useful shorthand. But language is not neutral. The words we use for a feeling shape what we think the feeling means, how long we expect it to last and what we think we should do about it.

Is mental health awareness making us more anxious?

In 2023, the psychologists Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews published a proposal in New Ideas in Psychology that went a step further. They called it the prevalence inflation hypothesis.

The idea has three parts. First, awareness efforts lead to better recognition of genuine mental health problems that were previously missed. That is the intended effect, and it is good. Second, awareness efforts may also lead some people to interpret and report milder, ordinary distress as a mental health problem. Third, and this is the part that should give everyone pause, that interpretation can become self-fulfilling. If someone comes to see normal nerves as an anxiety disorder, they may start avoiding the situations that cause the nerves. That is the authors' own example, and avoidance can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. The rise in reported problems then prompts more awareness campaigns, and the cycle continues.

Foulkes and Andrews were explicit that this is a hypothesis to be tested, not a proven finding. But some of the surrounding evidence points in an uncomfortable direction.

Universal programs do not always help. The MYRIAD trial, led by Willem Kuyken at Oxford and published in Evidence-Based Mental Health in 2022, randomized 84 UK secondary schools and 8,376 students aged 11 to 14. Schools delivered either a 10-lesson mindfulness program or their usual social-emotional teaching. After one year, the mindfulness training was no better than usual teaching on risk of depression, social-emotional functioning or wellbeing. A secondary analysis by Jesus Montero-Marin and colleagues found that students already at risk of mental health problems scored slightly worse on depression risk and wellbeing after the mindfulness training. The differences were small and not clinically meaningful, but the authors concluded that the program, as delivered, may be contraindicated for students with existing or emerging symptoms.

Explanations shape expectations. Joshua Kemp, James Lickel and Brett Deacon (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2014) gave people with past or current depression a fake but credible test result showing their symptoms were, or were not, caused by a chemical imbalance. The chemical imbalance explanation did not reduce self-blame. It did make people more pessimistic about their prognosis and less confident they could regulate their own mood. How we explain a feeling to ourselves changes what we believe we can do about it.

The feed is not a clinician. Anthony Yeung, Enoch Ng and Elia Abi-Jaoude (Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 2022) analyzed the 100 most popular TikTok videos about ADHD. Clinicians classified 52 as misleading, 27 as personal experience and 21 as useful. Most of the misleading content came from creators who were not healthcare providers.

None of this means awareness causes anxiety. It means the delivery matters, the framing matters, and a universal message aimed at everyone can land differently on the person who needed it and the person who did not.

Vocabulary is not regulation

Here is where the nervous system enters.

Naming a feeling genuinely helps. Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA (Psychological Science, 2007) found that putting feelings into words, a process called affect labeling, dampened the amygdala's response to negative emotional images and increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. A precise word for what you feel can take some of the heat out of it.

But there is a difference between naming a state and adopting an identity. "I feel anxious right now" describes weather. "I have anxiety" can start to sound like climate. The first points toward something you can work with. The second, applied to ordinary nerves, can quietly suggest that the feeling is permanent, that it belongs to you, and that the right response is to protect yourself from whatever triggers it.

And vocabulary on its own does not regulate anything. A nervous system that is chronically under-slept, overstimulated and starved of recovery will keep producing distress no matter how precisely you can describe it. The causes of nervous system dysregulation are mostly about load and recovery, not about words. As we argued in Anxiety Isn't a Symptom. It's a Signal., anxiety often carries information about how a life is arranged. Turning it into a label can mean we stop reading the message.

There is a commercial layer too. Once every feeling is a condition, every condition needs a product: an app to track it, a course to fix it, a subscription to manage it. We have written about how the self-care industry turned rest into a purchase. Mental health language has gone the same way. Monitoring a feeling all day is not the same as caring for it. The same goes for outsourcing it: a chatbot that is always available to process your feelings can be a comfort, but endless processing is not the same as being helped. We look at what it can and cannot do in ChatGPT as a Therapist. Sometimes what a person describes as anxiety is closer to the state of being stressed all the time, which is a problem of load before it is a problem of diagnosis.

What a better kind of awareness looks like

The answer is not less talk about mental health. It is more precise talk. A few principles that fit the evidence:

• Distinguish distress from disorder. Sadness after a loss, nerves before a presentation and exhaustion after a brutal quarter are normal human responses. They deserve care, but not automatically a diagnosis.
• Keep the door wide open for real problems. Persistent low mood, panic that limits your life, thoughts of self-harm or symptoms that do not lift deserve professional assessment. Nothing about this critique should make anyone hesitate to ask for help.
• Get assessed by a person, not a feed. If a video resonates, treat it as a prompt to talk to a qualified professional, not as a conclusion.
• Pair naming with doing. Name the feeling, then ask what it needs: sleep, a conversation, a boundary, a walk, a change at work. Labels should open a door, not become a room you live in.
• Be wary of avoidance for everyday nerves. Foulkes and Andrews point to avoidance as one route by which a label can make anxiety worse. Organizing life around never feeling uncomfortable tends to shrink it.

If you have spent the last few years learning a whole new language for your inner life, none of that was wasted. Many people finally have words for what they went through, and that is a gift. The next step is to let the words lead somewhere.

Naming is the beginning

Mental health awareness was built to get people out of silence, and it has. The next phase asks something harder: to hold our language more lightly, to tell the difference between suffering that needs treatment and discomfort that needs time, and to remember that a word for a feeling is a starting point.

You can be fluent in the vocabulary and still be exhausted. Fluency was never the goal. Regulation, connection and a life with room to recover are.

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Related reading: Anxiety Isn't a Symptom. It's a Signal. · What Causes Nervous System Dysregulation in Adults · The Self-Care Industry · ChatGPT as a Therapist