The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries.
All this mainstream awareness is reflected in the data too: by the latest federal estimates, about one in eight U.S. adults now takes an anti-depressant and one in five has recently received some kind of mental healthcare, an increase of almost 15 million people in treatment since 2002. Even in the recent past—from 2019 to 2022—use of mental-health services jumped by almost 40 percent among millions of U.S. adults with commercial insurance, according to a recent study in JAMA Health Forum.
But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics.
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