June 2026 How does a market forecast a mind? What happens when anxiety, depression, insomnia, loneliness, compulsive attention, burnout, and panic cease to appear only as forms of suffering and begin to appear as demand, retention, churn, productivity loss, insurance exposure, subscription opportunity, behavioural risk, or investable growth? What kind of society treats mental illness not only as a public-health crisis but as a market signal? These are the questions behind the

June 2026 What happens when populations are first psychologized, then monitored, then trained to monitor themselves? What happens when intimate suffering is translated into symptoms, symptoms into signals, signals into data, and data into automated feedback? The context is not “AI replacing therapists.” That is too crude, too managerial, too Silicon Valley. The real problematic is that cybercapitalism creates a social world where human care is expensive, delayed, stigmatized,

June 2026 The clinical core of the present work is the claim that contemporary desire is no longer merely aroused; it is engineered and augmented by a scopic‑technical apparatus that fabricates salience, assigns urgency, and routinizes repetition. What the subject experiences as “my” craving — intense, personal, necessary — is in fact externally optimized motivation: a stream of cues composed by interfaces, metrics, and narratives that pre‑activate goals (priming), sequence s

June 2026 What is desire when it no longer emerges from the subject, but arrives already enlarged, accelerated, and hallucinated by an automated visual environment? The problem is not that the subject “loses confidence” in their impulses. That formulation remains too psychological, too internal, too dependent on the fantasy that there is still a stable subject calmly evaluating the origin of its wishes. The more disturbing hypothesis is that the subject continues to act, but

Liviu Poenaru May 2026 Autonomous weapons begin with a brutal operational sequence: detect, classify, track, select, strike. In military discourse, this refers to systems capable of operating with varying degrees of autonomy in the absence of direct human decision at the moment of action (United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs n.d.). Cybercapitalism has transferred this logic from the battlefield into the field of perception. Visibility now operates as an autonomous we

Liviu Poenaru May 2026 A new social psychiatric concern is crystallizing around what British policymakers now call the “anxious generation” entering the labor market. A report led by former UK health secretary Alan Milburn argues that nearly one million young people in the United Kingdom are currently outside employment, education, or training, with mental ill-health — especially anxiety, depression, neurodevelopmental conditions, and digital overstimulation — playing a centr

THE MENTAL FORECAST Liviu Poenaru & Dr Stefania Ubaldi May 2026 A mental forecast for contemporary capitalism begins with a contradiction: the system produces bliss points while also producing permanent frustration. The bliss point, in the context of engineered food, refers to the optimized sensory zone where sugar, salt, fat, texture, aroma, and ease of consumption are calibrated to maximize pleasure and repeat consumption. In this sense, engineered food is not simply food;

THE MENTAL FORECAST Liviu Poenaru, May 2026 Mental health is no longer simply psychiatric. It is infrastructural. The crisis is not only located inside fragile individuals, unstable families, or overwhelmed clinics. It is also produced by environments that reorganize sleep, attention, emotional development, intimacy, comparison, and distress at population scale. Social media now appears less as a secondary cultural habit than as a public-health infrastructure with psychiatric

THE MENTAL FORECAST Liviu Poenaru, May 2026 The debate over deprescribing antidepressants is not simply a fight between “medicine” and “anti-medicine.” It is a fight over trust, review, and the right to decide when a medication is still needed. In May 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a plan to reduce psychiatric overprescribing, promote informed consent, and support tapering or discontinuation when clinically indicated (U.S. Department of Healt

THE MENTAL FORECAST LIVIU POENARU, May 2026 The mental forecast is no longer that adolescents are “sleepy.” It is that adolescence itself is being reorganized around chronic non-recovery. The recent Pediatrics study by Widome and colleagues found that, during 2021–2023, only 37.2 percent of U.S. adolescents aged 12 or 13 and only 22.3 percent of those aged 18 or 19 reported sleeping seven or more hours per night, the lowest prevalence observed across the 1991–2023 study perio