The air feels heavier. And the struggles are changing shape. Beyond my office walls, the world is shifting, and my clients sense the tremors. The things they once trusted, global order, democratic norms, and even their own personal safety, no longer feel solid. They feel brittle, as if one strong wind could bring it all down. And what they're sensing isn't imagined.
Much of our lives in the United States is spent chasing freedom and independence. That instinct reflects a broader cultural value system we're steeped in: individualism. Individualism prioritizes personal autonomy, self-reliance, and the individual's needs over those of the group. The United States has an individualism score of 91 out of 100, making it the most individualistic country in the world according to Gert Hofstede's model of national culture.
Contemporary Western culture strongly prefers locating the problems that bring people to psychotherapy within the individual. When we conceptualize mental health as an individual problem without adequately considering the social and cultural components, it becomes easy to reduce mental health to a product that can be marketed and sold. This simplified version of mental health becomes a commodity of neoliberalism, a philosophy that emphasizes capitalism, free markets, individual rights, and private property rights, amongst other values (Harvey, 2005).
