I have been concerned for quite some time about rising levels of depression and suicide in the United States, especially among young people. According to Gallup’s 2025 data, approximately 18 percent of Americans report having depression. That figure was about 10 percent a decade ago and just 5 percent in 2005. In the span of 25 years, rates have tripled. Something is clearly wrong.

I am very familiar with depression and how it is typically treated. When people learn about depression treatment, they are often introduced to different schools of thought: behavioral, cognitive, psychodynamic, humanist, existential, and others. These schools are less like competing skill sets and more like different languages. They largely describe the same underlying phenomena, using different terminology and emphasizing different aspects of the human experience.

What these schools have in common is an underlying assumption about the person being treated. The assumption is that something is wrong with the patient.

But what if that assumption is incorrect? What if depression is not a disorder located within the individual, but a normal reaction to a hostile environment? In that case, there is nothing for the therapist to fix. There is no missing insight to uncover and no new coping skill that will solve the problem. What is needed is a better environment.

This raises an obvious question: what has changed? Why is the environment so much more distressing now than it was in 2005, when depression rates hovered around 5 percent?

I have been thinking about this question for nearly a decade, and the conclusion is difficult to avoid. The economic environment has become too hostile. For many young Americans, the math simply no longer works. Even with full-time employment, basic expenses exceed typical take-home pay.

To illustrate this, consider the financial situation of the average young adult in the United States in 2025. The data used here are publicly available and can be verified independently.

The median annual salary for young adults with a high school diploma is approximately $38,000. After taxes, this amounts to about $2,615 per month in take-home pay. Now compare that income to unavoidable expenses: housing, transportation, food, healthcare, insurance, utilities, and other basic necessities. When these liabilities are totaled, they come to slightly over $3,600 per month. Without saving any money or spending anything on recreation, the average person is already short by roughly $1,000 every month.

A similar calculation can be made for young adults with a college degree. Median income rises to about $63,000 per year, but student loan payments add roughly $1,000 per month in additional liabilities. Even with the higher salary, expenses still exceed income by approximately $500 per month.

This, I would argue, is the primary driver behind rising rates of depression in the United States. Life is objectively harder for young people today than it was 25 years ago. It was harder 25 years ago than it was 50 years ago. If current trends continue, it will keep getting harder. Living standards will continue to fall, and depression rates will continue to rise.

What I do not want—for my children, or for yours, for those fortunate enough to afford having children—is a society where the deck is stacked against them from birth. The United States is rapidly becoming a country with little social mobility, where the so-called American Dream is only attainable by those born into wealth.

This leads to another question: how did things get this bad?

There is no simple explanation, and it is not something that can be addressed quickly. The approach I plan to take is to explain the outcome first, and then, in future discussions, work backward to show how each policy choice contributed to collapsing living standards and a growing mental health crisis.

The explanation itself is not glamorous. The core issue is U.S. tax policy. Since the 1980s, the United States has increasingly adopted regressive tax structures that extract resources from the poor and working class and redistribute them upward to the wealthy. If this continues, the pressures driving despair will only intensify.

There are many ways to design a fair tax system, but any sustainable solution must move resources back into circulation for the bottom half of the economy. This is not an ideological claim. It is a mathematical one. Importantly, variations of these ideas already enjoy broad bipartisan support.

If you care about the growing mental health crisis, this series will continue to break down how we arrived at this point and what can realistically be done to change course.

For anyone struggling with depression driven by economic strain, it is important to understand that you are not alone. You are one of roughly 150 million adults in the United States for whom the financial math no longer works. Depression is not just a mental health crisis. It is a warning signal from the economy itself, indicating that something in the system is broken.

Addressing it will require collective action. The implications of coordinated change are profound, and worth taking seriously.

Jail Psychologist

Episode 1: Depression Isn't Just In Your Head…