(Photo by RUANSHUNYI via Needpix/PDM 1.0)
Across the globe, people are waking up each day to news of conflict, climate disasters, rising authoritarianism, and deepening inequality. While these crises may differ in form and geography, they share a common feature: they are leaving psychological imprints on individuals and communities. Anxiety and exhaustion are becoming defining experiences of our time, as people navigate a world that feels increasingly unstable.
It is essential to distinguish clinical anxiety disorders from situational anxiety, an emotional response to systemic breakdown, and clinical anxiety disorders, which are medical conditions requiring professional care. The focus here is on the former: the rising emotional toll stemming from navigating unstable conditions with inadequate support.
Public discourse often treats mental health as a personal matter to manage through self-care routines, therapy apps, or digital detoxes. But this framing misses a deeper truth. Political, economic, and environmental conditions shape much of today’s emotional distress.
The Emotional Cost of a Fractured World
In today’s world, simply watching the news can be a destabilising experience. A civil war erupts in one region while another faces record-breaking temperatures or flash floods. Inflation soars, democratic institutions waver, and social media amplifies each crisis in real time. These cascading events are not only shaping geopolitics, but they are seeping into our daily lives, creating psychological strain.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 4% of the world’s population, about 301 million people, experience an anxiety disorder, making it the most common mental health condition worldwide. WHO analysis also found that the prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by around 25% during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, signalling a broader rise in emotional distress due to global upheaval.
Doomscrolling to negative news can repeatedly activate the body’s sympathetic fight-or-flight response, triggering the release of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, elevated cortisol can disrupt nearly every bodily system, weakening immune function, impairing sleep, increasing blood pressure, and contributing to burnout or chronic fatigue. Meanwhile, adrenaline spikes can cause persistent heartbeat quickening, anxiety, and restlessness even when danger has passed.
Despite this, dominant mental health narratives still frame anxiety primarily as a personal issue, a result of poor habits, weak willpower, or digital addiction. This perspective, while convenient for policymakers and corporations, misses the bigger picture. Professor Amanda Friesen in the political science department at Western University warns against the psychological toll of constant political information exposure, emphasizing that our emotional and cognitive systems are not designed to handle the unrelenting influx of global threats and crises.
Not All Anxiety is Shared Equally
Anxiety may seem like a shared emotional experience in today’s turbulent world, but the reality is far more unequal. The psychological toll of global instability falls unevenly along lines of wealth, geography, race, and social access.
The global economy paints a sobering picture. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) projects that the world economic output will slow to just 2.3% in 2025, down from 2.6% in 2024 and 3.0% in 2023. High inflation, debt repayments, and shrinking public budgets disproportionately burden developing countries, affecting their ability to provide mental health services. The World Bank’s February 2025 policy brief confirms that public spending on chronic illness and mental health remains inadequate. In lower-income countries, over 70% of healthcare funding comes from out-of-pocket payments, forcing individuals to bear most of the cost.
The British Psychological Society (BPS) shared its guidance on social justice in psychological therapies. BPS emphasizes that distress is often a rational response to external environmental factors. BPS is calling on psychologists to consider social contexts in their practices and improve diversity training among the profession.
We cannot separate emotional well-being from economic justice, nor can we build care infrastructures on the assumption that everyone starts from the same baseline. A just mental health future requires international cooperation, equitable investment, and a fundamental shift in how we understand vulnerability as a mirror of the system that shapes our lives.
Individual Coping and Collective Care
Amid the relentless churn of global unrest, economic tremors, and social upheaval, psychologists argue that our greatest and most reliable sources of agency is not controlling the uncontrollable but consciously steering ourselves: by discerning what we can influence, embracing ‘both/and’ thinking, designing flexible routines, and choosing international response over reflexive reactions, we not only survive chaos, but also we claim a grounded foothold in it.
Mental health professionals also recommend that we pause and breathe, honour the emotions that surface when familiarity slips away, and then actively seek the constraints in our lives which include values, routines, or community to serve as anchors. From there, we can explore actionable options, take even the smallest meaningful step forward, and extend kindness to others, grounding ourselves in purpose even amid chaos.
In a culture quick to pathologize worry, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki urges a rethink: anxiety, she says, is not merely a mental health liability, but a finely turned early-warning system that evolved to keep us safe. Rather than suppressing it, Suzuki recommends learning to regulate its intensity and redirect its restless energy into purposeful channels by taking a breath, going for a short walk, and practicing compassion for others. In an age marked by constant uncertainty, she argues reframing anxiety as an ally rather than an enemy may be one of the most practical skills we can cultivate.
In Western countries, society encourages us to journal, meditate, unplug from the news, or download a wellness app. While such tools can provide relief, they also risk framing emotional suffering as a personal failure rather than a reflection of broader systemic distress.
In Canada, Hul’qumi’num-speaking Indigenous women, including Cree and Métis matriarchs, founded the Red Willow Women’s Society, an Indigenous-led initiative in the Cowichan Tribes First Nations territory of British Columbia. This initiative blends traditional teachings with trauma-informed practices to support survivors of intergenerational trauma. Red Willow Women’s Society addresses the impacts of residential schools, the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families into government care, and systemic racism in healthcare.
In South Africa, Cape Town’s Ikamva Labantu, a 60-year-old community non-government organization (NGO), supports vulnerable township populations in Khayelitsha and Langa through holistic well-being programs. While originally focused on early childhood development, its work has expanded to include peer support and caregiver training, in partnership with the University of Cape Town (UCT). In 2023, as part of a UCT-led “Caring for Carers” initiative, UCT students trained community workers on the basics of mental health, equipping them to address caregiver stress and emotional fatigue.
A shift from personal coping to community care demands a redefinition of what it means to be “mentally well”. This collective approach to mental health expands the lens through which we understand distress in an age of overlapping crises. In this light, mental health becomes a collective project, rooted in the belief that healing is political, interdependent, and most powerful when done together.
Toward a Healthier, More Just World
We cannot separate the global mental health crisis we are witnessing today from the broader crises shaping the 21st century. Climate breakdown, deepening economic inequality, political instability, and the erosion of social trust are interconnected forces that structure how we live. Emotional responses like anxiety, grief, and overwhelm are reflections of the conditions we inhabit, and they demand a collective, systemic response.
Mental health experts also remind us that personal resilience is not about denying reality, but about learning to navigate it with intention and awareness. Self-control (recognizing what we can and cannot influence) can anchor us in moments of chaos, helping us respond deliberately instead of reacting out of fear. Furthermore, grounding ourselves in core values, stable routines, and supportive relationships is also crucial so we can take small but meaningful steps even when the path forward is unclear.
While therapeutic tools have value, healthcare providers often prescribe them in a vacuum, without attention to the structural precarity that causes so much of today’s emotional distress. We need a cultural and political shift toward collective care. Such a shift means cultivating spaces where people can process their experiences together, where empathy replaces judgement, and where we actively encourage vulnerability. Collective care also requires recognizing the community as an infrastructure that protects us when institutions fail, reminding us that we do not have to face the enormity of global crises alone.
As we confront the mental health consequences of a fractured world, the path forward lies in addressing root causes, not just symptoms. Building a more just mental health landscape requires more than expanded services; it demands policies that reduce inequality and support the resilience of communities most impacted by crisis. In the face of growing global uncertainty, collective care could be a foundation for a more stable and equitable future.
Edited by Emma Webb and Light Naing
