In this interview, economist Tyler Cowen argues that the United States is already in a deep mental‑health crisis, driven by factors such as the opioid epidemic, COVID‑19 lockdowns, and a surge in therapy and antidepressant use that predates the pandemic but has been amplified by it. He questions whether the rise in mental‑health services represents over‑consumption or simply reflects a genuine increase in distress, noting his uncertainty about the effectiveness of therapy and medication. Cowen also observes a widening political and cultural divide, describing how many people seem to inhabit different “universes” despite sharing facts about events like January 6. The conversation turns to the role of social media: Cowen acknowledges it can act as an amplifier of negativity but argues that similar mood swings have occurred in earlier eras (e.g., 17th‑century pamphlet wars, 1990s domestic terrorism) and that media technology is often blamed post‑hoc. He critiques Jonathan Haidt’s strongly negative view of social media as inconsistent with Haidt’s free‑speech advocacy. Cowen proposes that the current era will see “greater weirdness” – a mix of pessimism, odd cultural fads (UFO belief, conspiracy theories) and heightened anxiety – that is likely to persist regardless of whether social platforms disappear. He remains skeptical that optimism will return, seeing the trend toward cultural oddities as a structural feature of the historical cycle.
Chapters
I think there's a lot of evidence we're in a mental health crisis already. Now, the parts of it you sort of read about in the New York Times are the mental health crises of intellectuals and media types, which are somewhat their own fault and overblown. But the actual mental health crisis relating from opioids and COVID issues and lockdowns and schools being shut down and people driving 100 miles an hour and so on. Those are very real. And a lot of those numbers even predate COVID. COVID accelerated and exposed much of what's happened. But that could be the number one issue of our time in America is the mental health crisis. Just look at the percentage of young people taking antidepressants or people who go to therapy, which I'm not at all opposed. But the percentage of super successful, like 32-year-olds I meet who proudly announce they've been in therapy 10 years and don't even think that's weird. Like, any one of them, it might be the correct thing to do, but the percentage I see of that seems to me like crazy wrong and too high for what you would expect. And I think that's a mental health crisis. I don't know where it came from. I worry about it.
As a, as an economist, do you think about sort of the incentives of insurance and the sort of the trend towards treating mental health as sort of a physical health. So somebody's, you know, third party is paying for it. It's the same problem with overconsumption of medical services more generally. But here there's a sort of a— is a bigger problem, right? Because how much you need is sort of— it's by definition in your head. So it's not, you know, the being always at a psychiatrist is sort of different than, you know, getting an extra, you know, heart exam or something like that.
I don't know if there's overconsumption of the service. And I'm also not sure how much therapy helps people. I'm not sure how much antidepressants help people. And I have read in all these areas. I'm just not sure what the answers are. But I'm pretty sure there's just too much of the malady of mental health problems. Yeah. And I guess when I— And I see a version of it in our intellectuals who have just become so negative about each other. I'm sure you see it on Twitter every day.
Yeah.
Again, to me, that's the least worrisome part of it. But a lot of people I've known have just flipped out about politics. And again, I might even agree with most or maybe even all of what they say, but it seems to me perspectively, they're so off. I consider them, I wouldn't say like ideological opponents, but I feel like very distant from them. Even when I might agree like, well, January 6th, that was terrible. The people committed treason. The this, the that, you know, the FBI was fine to come in and take the materials. But at the end of the day, I don't feel I'm living in the same universe as a lot of those people.
Yeah. Well, I mean, some of the political stuff is very weird. So if you propose some kind of regulation that on trans issues, for example, goes back to what we had in 2010, I mean, the reaction will be fascism. You know, this is going to lead to people dying. I mean, it is so disproportionate to sort of objectively what's what's going on. I wonder, and I wonder what, you know, I tend to think that, you know, it's such a, um, uh, previewing another, uh, something else I think I might want to write about. So if you look at, for example, the 1990s, um, and you have the Oklahoma City bombing, um, you have the bombings of abortion clinics, um, you have Ruby Ridge, you have Waco, I mean, a serious body count.
I lived through all this.
And you can imagine, um, imagine if this stuff was happening today. People would say, we, you know, it just like we just saw it on the news.
I, you know, I'm just old enough I have to remember this.
And, you know, we saw it on the news and we sort of, we sort of moved on. And it's the level of violence, you know, political violence at the time was, you know, much higher than it is today. There aren't a lot of these incidents today. And yet the sort of the pessimism and to worry about our politics is just off the charts. And I just have to think it's social media and the internet. It's just created, you know, the news always had a negativity bias, but I think the negativity bias has just been so extreme that like, it's like no matter how good things get, we're going to be extremely pessimistic about America for the rest of our lives. And that itself is sort of depressing.
Some of it may well be social media as an amplifier, but I saw comparable trends on cable TV before social media was much of a thing. So, I wonder if the greater interest in social media is not itself an endogenous part of the process. There's plenty of earlier periods of historical time, maybe on average half of them, where just the social mood is getting worse. And there are particular reasons, but maybe the most general theory is that half the time in history you're approaching a period of greater derangement. And that might be a more important point than the particular culprits. Like, there are social contagion effects with all communications media, but maybe they're not actually as causal as they seem. They're just right in front of our eyes all the time. The 17th century in England that being so deranged. Was that social media? Well, they had all these like pamphlets at the pubs and the alehouses. Like, maybe it was, but it still— that seems to miss the point a bit as well.
Yeah, so you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, I think, saying that there's this sort of dynamic and it moves in one direction or not. And it might be the technology might push us in one reason, one direction or other. But, you know, you could imagine a sort of a alternative history where social media was never invented or never took off, and we still might be just going in that direction for whatever reason. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, so it's like email can carry certain kinds of messages. You can blame the email, but at the end of the day, you know, maybe the messages get carried anyway. It just seems to me it's prematurely judged far too often. It's a kind of people see it right in front of their faces bias, like, oh, I hate that bastard on Twitter. Like it's pissing me off, it must be social media. It's a very crude form of inference, not befitting of real academics, I would say. They need to be more detached. And certainly there could be something to what they're saying. I don't dismiss it, but people leap at that explanation so quickly. And I think that is itself part of the derangement. Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think that that's the way social media has you, though, you know, has you expect—
You see this the most in Jonathan Haidt, right?
Ah, what do you mean?
Well, his take on social media, it's far too negative, and it's way more negative than the evidence itself justifies, in my opinion.
Yeah.
And he's this weird mix of someone who's such a huge defender of free speech, but when free speech comes on social media, all of a sudden it's ruining the world. Yeah. And I don't really get how he squares all those views. It's not logically impossible, but it's not an easy or comfortable fit either.
So, I mean, my experience, again, I don't know, I sort of, my experience leads me to think that the—
Seems to me social media are probably bad for 12 to 14-year-old girls and probably good for most of the rest of us. That would be like my most intuitive answer, but very subject to revision.
So I think it's good. I mean, I think it's good for me.
But they're bad for a lot of academics.
I guess they get— Yeah, they might be, they might be at the—
they get lumped in with the 12 to 14-year-old girl.
There might be a similarity there. Yeah, there might be something in common. I think that's right. But the thing about the difference is that the academics and the journalists, I would put them in the same category, sort of are the lens through which we see, you know, everything else.
So yeah, yeah, of course.
And so this is, uh, yeah, this could, this could potentially be a problem. I don't think that the average person, you know, working, you know, as a manager at Walmart is, is necessarily driven crazy by social media, although although some might, is just that everything they consume is produced by the kinds of people, um, who tend— who do tend to be, uh, who do tend to be driven crazy by social media. And, and that might— that might be a problem. I mean, we'll— I guess we'll, we'll see. This is a testable hypothesis, right? Either the, the pessimism will stay with us for over the next decades, or, you know, we'll, we'll see if it's possible to have a world where everyone is on Twitter and everyone is holding hands and, and loving each other. If we can get back to like the 1990s level of cultural optimism, with Twitter still, still having the role. And maybe it's endogenous too, like maybe people stop using Twitter. Just even if people stop using Twitter, I would say that, that, that, that still, that still works with your sort of, uh, cyclical theory of these things, because we're not slaves of the technology. I think that's the argument that people make, that sort of is a deterministic thing, and whether the technology is compatible with a, um, with a more optimistic sort of cultural worldview, or we can choose to get rid of it. Maybe we choose for whatever is a memetic social contagion reasons, we stop using it. That would indicate we're sort of more free. We have options here, right?
In my view, the chance of returning to optimism is pretty low. I call it greater weirdness. I just think we're going to see greater weirdness. And that, I suppose, I think would happen with or without social media. If you just look at it, what, a 25-year period? No, I don't think they're the same. So the weirdness is all kinds of bubbles of funny kinds of optimism. So just like more people believing in UFOs, it's not pessimism per se, like it might be, oh, they're all going to kill us, but it's mainly weirdness. And if you have a 25-year period where you have 9/11, the financial crisis, COVID, a bunch of other bad events, war in Ukraine, you're going to have more weirdness.
