Gabrielle D Beacken, Inga K Trauthig, and Samuel C Woolley June 2026 Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used by political elites for propaganda, yet adoption and uses vary across weakening democracies. Scholarship often assumes AI's inevitability and transformative impact, overlooking the geographical, political, economic, and social structures that shape propaganda. This study responds to calls for comparative international research on GenAI propagand

Elad Refoua Karny Gigi Inbar Levkovich Dorit Hadar Shoval Zohar Elyoseph Iftach Tsafrir Oori Pen Tal Angert Yuval Haber May 2026 Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become de facto mental health resources for millions of users worldwide, driven by accessibility, low cost, anonymity, and growing gaps in professional care. This rapid, unregulated adoption raises urgent concerns: misinformation from AI hallucinations, erosion of data privacy, algorit

Miyeon Kim Nancy Rhodes May 2026 As social media becomes central to environmental communication, understanding what drives widespread sharing is essential. This scoping review analyzes 82 peer-reviewed studies examining whether emotional environmental content on social media contributes to virality. It maps research trends, methodologies, and theoretical approaches used to study emotion in online environmental communication. Findings show a sharp increase in publications si

Laurențiu Niculescu May 2026 The rapid adoption of AI chatbots for emotional support and quasi-therapeutic interaction raises questions that existing clinical and regulatory frameworks are not equipped to address. This Perspective applies the psychic arbitrage framework—which reconceptualizes defense mechanisms as energy-conversion operations on internal psychic markets—to analyze the specific transactional distortions produced by chatbot interaction. The framework identifies

Timothy Paris April 2026 This paper uses Foulkes’ theories of the social nature of the individual and Elias’ theories of symbols, power, and ideology to explore how neoliberal ideology manifests in contemporary mental health systems. Using clinical and organizational examples, this paper aims to understand how neoliberalism shapes the professional and patient identities that exist within mental health services in the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK).

Lauren Van De Hey April 2026 Is mental health an emerging political identity? In the first study that investigates experiencing mental illness as a political identity, I find that it is. Using a nationally representative survey of Americans fielded in the 2022 CES (N = 1,000), I answer the question: “For whom is mental illness a political identity?” I adapt Jardina’s work (White Identity Politics. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108645157

Vladimír Šucha April 2026 This paper introduces a theoretical framework for understanding how seemingly innocuous AI systems create cumulative effects on human cognition, emotion, and agency that current governance approaches fail to address. Drawing on environmental health science, we propose that “low-risk” AI applications, those falling below regulatory thresholds in frameworks such as the EU AI Act, function as cognitive environmental contaminants whose collective and sus

Jinghui Huang, Douglas Yeung Leong, Siow Ann Chong, Mythily Subramaniam March 2026 Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a recent technological advancement that has become increasingly ubiquitous in its usage. Conversational AI, powered by large language models (LLMs) in particular, has opened many possibilities in psychiatry for providing psychoeducation, mental health support and even evidencebased therapy for people with mental health concerns. Despite its possible be

Ashleigh Golden & Elias Aboujaoude March 2026 Millions are turning to general-purpose AI chatbots for psychological support, potentially reinforcing symptoms such as intolerance of uncertainty, “need to know” compulsions, and perfectionism. Clinical observation and emerging research suggest chatbot features exacerbate transdiagnostic avoidance—a process integral to OCD and anxiety—perpetuating maladaptive cycles and hindering corrective learning. We propose a framework in wh

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 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 consequences.

THE MENTAL FORECAST 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 Health and Human Ser

THE MENTAL FORECAST 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 period (Widome et al

THE MENTAL FORECAST Dr Liviu Poenaru & Dr Stefania Ubaldi May 2026 What does a society become when economic injury no longer stops at the surface of life, but enters the gut, the immune system, and the brain? The microbiome is one of the body’s exposed borders. Industrial food, chronic stress, sleep disruption, antibiotics, pollution, poverty, isolation, and accelerated rhythms pass through it. Mental life is not sealed inside the psyche. It is crossed by microbial metabolite

THE MENTAL FORECAST May 2026 What does a society become when distress is no longer exceptional, but part of the weather of ordinary life? WHO’s most recent global signal is severe: more than one billion people are living with mental health conditions, with anxiety and depression among the most common, while suicide still accounted for an estimated 727,000 deaths in 2021 (World Health Organization, 2025). A 2026 Global Burden of Disease analysis also reports that anxiety and d