HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE SICK IF SICKNESS STILL COUNTS AS SUCCESS?
- il y a 1 jour
- 2 min de lecture
Aug. 2026
The trick is crude: break down visibly and you become a case; keep producing while you deteriorate and you remain normal.
A 2026 Lancet analysis estimated 1.17 billion prevalent cases across twelve mental disorders in 2023—95.5% more than in 1990, with a 24.2% rise even after age standardization (GBD 2023 Mental Disorder Collaborators 2026). These are modelled cases, not unique persons or a census of psychic damage. Burnout lies outside this diagnostic perimeter: the WHO classifies it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition. Subclinical, dissociative, compulsive and exhausted forms of functioning also vanish from the count when they remain socially acceptable because they still work.
The hypothesis of Pathomorphic Social Selection names this missing field. Cybercapitalism does not merely discover vulnerable individuals. It constructs social, economic and algorithmic environments that reward operability over viability: acceleration as ambition, narcissistic exposure as personal branding, hypervigilance as responsiveness, compulsive repetition as engagement, dissociative endurance as resilience. It does not directly select diagnoses. It selects postures, affects and rhythms that resemble, intensify and normalize pathology while continuing to produce value (Poenaru, forthcoming).
This reverses the usual epidemiological picture. The undiagnosed remainder is not necessarily healthy; it may simply still be useful. Someone can work while exhausted, remain online while fragmented, smile while dissociated and consume while anxious. This person has not escaped the pathological niche. She may be its ideal product.
No honest global figure exists for this wider population. Burnout overlaps with depression and anxiety; subclinical deterioration has no unified measure; Pathomorphic Social Selection has not yet been operationalized epidemiologically. Adding invented millions would be fake science. But the absence of a number is not evidence of health.
The decisive question is not how many mentally disordered people cybercapitalism contains. It is how much pathology a society can reward, normalize and circulate before anyone qualifies as ill. Psychiatry counts recognized disorders. The system helps produce pathological forms of life—and calls the still-operative ones successful.
Liviu Poenaru
References
GBD 2023 Mental Disorder Collaborators. 2026. “Updated Trends in the Global Prevalence and Burden of Mental Disorders, 1990–2023.” The Lancet 407 (10543): 2040–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00519-2.
Poenaru, Liviu. Forthcoming. Lost in Self-Consumption. Pathomorphic Social Selection and the Evolutionary Trap of Cybercapitalism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
World Health Organization. 2019. “Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon.’”
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