The Great Awokening: A Mental Health Crisis Spinoff

 The essay by Ian Smith (Chronicles, 19 August 2026, linked below) reviews Jonathan Alpert's book Therapy Nation and offers a cultural diagnosis: the explosive growth of therapy in the United States has not reduced anxiety and dysfunction; it has helped produce a more fragile, externally blaming, and polarised society. Wokeness is presented as one visible expression of that fragility.

Alpert (a therapist himself) contends that therapy shifted from a limited, problem-focused intervention into a mass cultural practice. Mental-health spending has roughly doubled every decade since the mid-1980s while reported rates of anxiety, depression, and related conditions have climbed, especially among the young. The expansion of the therapist workforce has, in his view, lowered average quality: many sessions become open-ended validation rather than structured work toward agency and resilience. Patients are encouraged to locate the source of distress in external "nemeses" (parents, bosses, institutions, identity groups) rather than in controllable personal factors. Over time this fosters patterns of emotional lightness: avoidance of adversity, high need for affirmation, and ready adoption of victim or oppressor frameworks.

Smith links this directly to the Great Awokening: a culture that rewards grievance, identity-based moral status, and the demand that institutions manage emotional safety is the societal-scale version of the same habits. Blue areas show higher therapy utilisation; identity categories can function like clinical diagnoses that confer exemptions or moral authority. The result is described as a population of "emotional lightweights" who struggle with disagreement, setbacks, and competing claims to truth.

The timing lines up with independent data. Self-reported anxiety, depression, and self-harm among adolescents and young adults rose sharply from the early-to-mid 2010s, the same window in which social-justice language, campus activism, and cancel dynamics intensified. The rise has been steeper among young women and among self-identified liberals. Some researchers treat the mental-health crisis and the cultural shift as mutually reinforcing (social media + victimhood narratives amplify both). Others reverse the arrow and argue that the spread of certain identity frameworks itself contributes to distress by training people to scan for threat and injustice. Therapy culture sits in the middle of that feedback loop: it can medicalise ordinary unhappiness and teach external attribution at scale.

Correlation is not proof of single causation. Other large forces were operating simultaneously: smartphones and social media, delayed adulthood, family instability, elite overproduction, and the declining status of traditional sources of meaning. Therapy is not uniformly harmful; well-conducted cognitive-behavioural or exposure-based work demonstrably helps many people. The critique is aimed at the diluted, validation-heavy, blame-externalising version that became culturally dominant. Certain subcultures adopted and then institutionalised habits of emotional fragility and competitive victimhood that then spread through universities, media, HR departments, and online platforms.

The essay's value is that it treats the mental-health expansion and the cultural revolution as connected phenomena rather than separate stories. Whether therapy culture is a primary driver, an amplifier, or merely a parallel symptom remains contested, but the observed patterns: rising distress, rising external attribution, and the political style of the Awokening are real. So is the general craziness of the Left.