YOUR SUFFERING IS A GROWTH MARKET

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 mental forecast: the prediction of population distress under conditions where markets increasingly organize the production, measurement, treatment, neglect, monetization, and valuation of mental life.

The context is already planetary. WHO reported in 2025 that more than 1 billion people were living with mental health conditions, with anxiety and depression among the most common; WHO also states that 15% of working-age adults had a mental disorder in 2019 and that depression and anxiety cost the global economy about US$1 trillion each year in lost productivity (World Health Organization, 2025; World Health Organization, 2024).

The problematic is not simply that many people are unwell. The deeper problem is that unwellness is becoming infrastructural. A distressed population is not only treated by markets; it is interpreted by markets. Depression becomes absence, reduced productivity, medication demand, therapy demand, wellness demand, and platform withdrawal risk. Anxiety becomes checking, refreshing, searching, scrolling, reassurance-seeking, trading, buying, avoiding, and returning. Loneliness becomes social-media dependency, chatbot intimacy, parasocial attachment, dating-app monetization, self-help consumption, and algorithmic companionship. Burnout becomes a workplace analytics problem, a corporate wellness opportunity, a coaching market, a monitoring regime, and a retention risk. The population is therefore read twice: clinically, as suffering; financially, as a field of future behaviour.

This is where the mental forecast connects to the sentiment market. Finance already understands that expectation is not purely rational calculation. Investor sentiment affects stock returns most strongly where valuation is subjective and hard to arbitrage; media pessimism has been shown to predict downward pressure on market prices and higher trading volume; narrative economics argues that contagious stories can influence economic behaviour and major economic events (Baker and Wurgler, 2006; Tetlock, 2007; Shiller, 2017).

The mental forecast extends that logic from the market to the nervous system. Once distress can be measured as search volume, app use, sleep disruption, heart-rate variability, mood tracking, productivity loss, attention instability, purchase intent, or treatment demand, it becomes part of a predictive economy. The market does not merely ask who is suffering. It asks which firms can convert that suffering into retention, intervention, subscription, advertising efficiency, workforce control, therapeutic infrastructure, or behavioural prediction.

Digital mental health makes this contradiction explicit because it presents itself as care while expanding the commercial perimeter around distress. Mental-health apps may widen access, lower barriers, and offer support to people who would otherwise receive little or nothing; that must be acknowledged. But access under commercial conditions is not neutral. A JAMA Network Open study of 578 mental-health apps found that many offered basic features such as psychoeducation, goal setting, and mindfulness, while privacy challenges remained common and app-store ratings did not reliably indicate stronger privacy protections (Camacho et al., 2022). The question is therefore not whether digital care is useful. The question is what happens when care becomes a data interface, when relapse becomes a retention opportunity, when symptom tracking becomes behavioural surveillance, and when psychological fragility becomes a source of corporate intelligence.

The mental forecast is the future tense of capture. A population is made anxious by precarity, comparison, debt, labour discipline, algorithmic acceleration, crisis media, war imagery, ecological dread, and social fragmentation; then that anxiety is measured, segmented, treated, priced, insured, managed, and fed back into systems optimized for growth. In finance, The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has warned that digital engagement practices and predictive analytics may be designed to increase revenues, data collection, or time spent on a platform; in the mental economy, the same architecture appears as therapeutic design, wellness optimization, productivity recovery, and behavioural correction (SEC, 2021).

The command is quiet but brutal: find the distress, predict the relapse, classify the risk, retain the user, sell the intervention, report the growth. This is not merely a world with more mental illness. It is a world in which mental illness becomes forecastable population material: a market for prediction, a surface of valuation, and a resource for companies that learn to profit from the nervous system before the nervous system breaks.

Dr Liviu Poenaru

References

Baker, M., and Wurgler, J. (2006). “Investor Sentiment and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns.” The Journal of Finance, 61(4), 1645–1680.

Camacho, E., Levin, L., Torous, J., et al. (2022). “Assessment of Mental Health Services Available Through Smartphone Apps.” JAMA Network Open, 5(12), e2248784.

SEC. (2021). “SEC Requests Information and Comment on Broker-Dealer and Investment Adviser Digital Engagement Practices.” U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Shiller, R. J. (2017). “Narrative Economics.” American Economic Review, 107(4), 967–1004.

Tetlock, P. C. (2007). “Giving Content to Investor Sentiment: The Role of Media in the Stock Market.” The Journal of Finance, 62(3), 1139–1168.

World Health Organization. (2024). “Mental Health at Work.”

World Health Organization. (2025). “Over a Billion People Living with Mental Health Conditions — Services Require Urgent Scale-Up.”