In the United States as in many other societies, rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, drug abuse, self-harm (including suicides) and other mental health problems greatly increase during the holiday season and just after the New Year.
In the American context, this crisis is largely explained as a reflection of private and personal troubles rather than as a symptom of an unhealthy society that is plagued by extreme wealth and income inequality, economic precarity, loneliness and social atomization, pathocracy and the culture of cruelty, and a form of predatory capitalism that has financialized all areas of life, fueling false needs, endless consumerism and feelings of spiritual and emotional emptiness which, by design, can never be fully satisfied.
