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Mental health is getting worse in the West, by the terms we use to measure it.

The rise is due to many complex interacting factors, and we in the therapeutic professions are implicated too.

States of mind are not rigid categories but dimensions of being.

Between a quarter and a fifth of young people in the UK now suffer a mental disorder by psychiatrists’ criteria, and over a half of young people say they have or have in the past suffered a mental disorder. One in six adults in America is prescribed psychiatric medication. These statistics represent a huge and relatively recent shift in how our society thinks about problems of thinking, feeling and being; it’s clear that, in Western society, by the terms with which we currently define it, our mental health is getting worse. I work as a general practitioner in the UK, and around 90% of clinical encounters to manage mental ill-health take place not in hospitals or with specialist psychiatrists, but with doctors in the community like myself. Between a third and a half of my consultations touch on mental illness.

Many factors have influenced this shift, and because so much discussion of it takes place online, opinion about causes has become polarised. One view is that........

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