The Therapy Trap
Why the most treated generation in history is also the most anxious
When I was seventeen, a cardiologist told me my football career was over.
Winter training camp. Routine physical. They found something wrong with my heart. Just like that, the thing I’d built my entire identity around was gone. No dramatic injury. No final match. A doctor’s sentence and a door closing.
I don’t remember anyone suggesting I go to therapy. It was Moldova in the early 2000s. You absorbed the hit, grieved in your own messy way, and eventually found something else to pour yourself into. I chose marketing, then design. Fourteen years later, I’m still building on what grew from that wreckage.
I’m not telling this story to romanticize suffering or to say therapy wouldn’t have helped. Maybe it would have. I’m telling it because something in me worked during that period — some internal mechanism that took a devastating loss and, over time, converted it into direction.
And I worry that we’re losing trust in that mechanism.
The Paradox
Here’s what keeps nagging at me. Gen Z has more access to mental health resources than any generation in history. More therapy, more awareness, more language for their inner lives. And by every measure we have, they’re the most anxious generation we’ve ever recorded.
The numbers tell a strange story. Between 2022 and 2025, therapy uptake among Gen Z jumped 22%. Nearly half (46%) now have a formal mental health diagnosis, up from 42% three years earlier.1
The Deloitte Global 2025 survey, covering 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, found that 40% of Gen Zs feel stressed or anxious all or most of the time.2 This isn’t just an American phenomenon.
More therapy. More diagnoses. And the generation isn’t measurably healthier.
Researchers have a name for this: the Treatment Prevalence Paradox. More treatment, but no less depression.3 You’d expect the curve to bend the other way.
Now, I want to be careful here. Correlation isn’t causation, and there are a dozen confounding variables: smartphones, social media, economic precarity, a pandemic. I’m not arguing that therapy causes anxiety. But I do think something in how we’ve scaled the therapeutic mindset deserves scrutiny.
When Language Expands Too Far
In 2016, psychologist Nick Haslam published a paper on what he called “concept creep”: the way harm-related words like trauma, abuse, and addiction have gradually expanded to cover milder and milder experiences.4
Trauma once meant severe psychological damage from extreme events. Now it describes a difficult conversation with a boss. ADHD once described a specific neurological condition. Now it’s casually self-diagnosed by anyone who struggles to focus while juggling twelve browser tabs. Anxiety once meant a clinical disorder. Now it’s interchangeable with nervousness.
Haslam wasn’t dismissing genuine suffering. He was pointing out a risk: when clinical language colonizes everyday experience, ordinary difficulty starts to feel pathological. The nervous feeling before a job interview becomes “my anxiety.” A bad week becomes “I’m so depressed.” A strict parent becomes “my childhood trauma.”
Each expansion feels compassionate in the moment. And each one strips someone of the belief that they can handle what they’re feeling without professional intervention.
I notice this in myself as a parent. The temptation to preemptively shield my daughter from every discomfort is enormous.
Every parenting forum, every Instagram account, every well-meaning article pushes toward more protection, more vigilance, more worry. The therapeutic vocabulary gives that impulse a sense of authority. It’s hard to argue with someone who frames overprotection as “safeguarding mental health.”
The Untruths We’ve Absorbed
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified three ideas that have worked their way into how we raise young people.5 They called them the Three Great Untruths:
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Always trust your feelings.
Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
These feel intuitive, which is exactly what makes them dangerous. They contradict cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most evidence-based approach we have. They contradict what we know about how resilience actually develops. And they feed a worldview Haidt calls “safetyism,” where emotional discomfort is treated as inherently dangerous.
The trouble is that humans are antifragile.6
Nassim Taleb’s term, but the observation is ancient. Bones need impact to maintain density. Muscles need resistance to grow. Immune systems need exposure. And psychologically, we need the experience of struggling through hard things and discovering we survived them.
I’ve been writing a book about this — about what it means to become antifragile in a world of accelerating chaos.
One of the principles I keep returning to is hormesis: the idea that small doses of stress don’t just fail to harm biological systems, they actively strengthen them. Vaccines work this way. Exercise works this way. And I’m increasingly convinced that emotional development works this way too.
We’ve been systematically removing the micro-stressors that would have built an entire generation’s psychological immune system. Then we’re surprised when they can’t fight off the infection.
Where I Might Be Wrong
I have to be honest about the limits of my own argument.
Maybe Gen Z reports more anxiety because they have better language for it, not because they’re weaker. Maybe rising diagnosis rates reflect reduced stigma rather than concept creep. Maybe the generation that’s most willing to talk about mental health is also the generation most likely to get counted in surveys about it.
And genuine mental illness is real.
Clinical depression is devastating. Severe anxiety disorders are debilitating. PTSD from actual trauma requires treatment.
I’ve watched people I care about struggle with conditions that no amount of “toughening up” could address. Anyone who uses the resilience argument to dismiss real suffering has misunderstood the point entirely.
The question I’m circling isn’t whether therapy works. It does, for the people who need it. The question is whether we’ve created a culture that teaches everyone they need it. And whether that teaching, applied indiscriminately, might be weakening the very capacities it claims to protect.
There’s a difference between a person with clinical depression who needs medication and support, and a person going through a hard season who needs time, exercise, friendship, and meaningful work.
Treating both the same doesn’t help the second person. It teaches them they can’t handle what they absolutely can.
The Subtraction We Need
There’s a principle in Taleb’s work called via negativa: the idea that sometimes the most powerful intervention is removing the intervention. Doctors who stop over-prescribing often get better patient outcomes than doctors who add another drug. Fasting can do more for certain conditions than another supplement. Subtraction, counterintuitively, is often the stronger move.
I think the same logic applies here.
The most radical thing we could do for a generation drowning in therapeutic language might be to take some of it away. To let a nervous feeling just be nervousness, not a disorder. To let a bad month just be a bad month, not a diagnosis. To restore the space between ordinary suffering and clinical illness that concept creep has steadily eroded.
This might sound cruel, but it’s not. It’s actually the deeper kindness. The kind that trusts people to metabolize their own difficulty.
The Weight We Were Built to Carry
In September 1940, psychiatrists predicted that the German bombing of London would produce millions of psychiatric casualties. Mass hysteria. Widespread mental breakdown.7
The opposite happened.
As the Blitz continued with fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, psychiatric admissions dropped. Londoners became more resilient, not less. Community bonds strengthened. People who had been vaguely depressed before the war seemed oddly invigorated by having a real problem to face.
The experts had assumed fragility. They found something else entirely.
I think about those Londoners when I watch the current discourse around mental health. The constant labeling, the pathologizing of ordinary difficulty, the insistence that you probably can’t handle your own life without professional support.
We don’t need to go back to enduring nightly bombings. But we might need to recover some trust in our own capacity to carry weight. To sit with discomfort long enough to discover it passes. To let difficulty do its ancient work of making us stronger.
When I lost football at seventeen, nobody handed me a clinical framework. Nobody told me I was experiencing trauma. So instead of becoming a patient, I was free to become something else. The loss didn’t define me. The rebuilding did.
That freedom — the freedom to reconstruct an identity from wreckage without someone first convincing you that you’re broken — might be the most important thing we’re taking away from young people right now.
And giving it back might be simpler than we think. Not by adding another intervention. By having the courage to remove one.
Harmony Healthcare IT, “State of Gen Z Mental Health” (2025). Survey of 1,000+ Americans aged 18–28.
Deloitte, “Global 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey” (2025). 23,000+ respondents across 44 countries.
Jorm, A.F., et al. “Has increased provision of treatment reduced the prevalence of common mental disorders? Review of the evidence from four countries.” World Psychiatry, 16(1), 90–99 (2017).
Haslam, N. “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17 (2016).
Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press (2018). See also the original Atlantic essay (2015).
Taleb, N.N. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House (2012).
Jones, E., et al. “Civilian morale during the Second World War: Responses to air raids re-examined.” Social History of Medicine, 17(3), 463–479 (2004). See also: Shrier, A. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Sentinel (2024).