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 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

Liviu Poenaru April 2026 No, we are not facing only an erosion of epistemic trust, but an epistemic shift. The problem is not simply that people trust less; it is that they increasingly trust differently. The collapse of confidence in institutions, science, journalism, images, and expert systems does not produce a population of lucid skeptics calmly examining evidence. More often, it produces subjects who are epistemically disoriented and therefore newly available to substitu

Excerpt from L. Poenaru, LOST IN SELF-CONSUMPTION. Blackout Selection and the Anti-Darwinian Regime of Extraction (in press, Cambridge Scholars) What kind of system selects individuals only to erode the very capacities it depends on? What form of selection no longer aims at preservation, stabilization, or reproduction, but instead organizes the progressive depletion of those it identifies as most functional? And what does it mean, biologically and structurally, to live with

What kind of technology claims to connect the world while quietly training it to disintegrate from within? Social media are atomic bombs with a slow temporal logic: they do not flatten cities in a second, which is precisely why they remain socially acceptable. Their devastation is cleaner, more profitable, and easier to deny. Instead of immediate ruins, they produce chronic erosion: of attention, of sleep, of self-worth, of trust, of developmental stability. The usual defense

What if the most dangerous shift is not that machines produce falsehoods, but that they produce credibility without ever passing through truth? The empirical trigger for this reflection lies in a report published in Nature by Chris Stokel-Walker (2026), documenting a controlled epistemic contamination: researchers deliberately fabricated a fictitious disease, Bixonimania , embedded it within counterfeit academic articles, and subsequently observed that several AI chatbots re

Liviu Poenaru, PhD What if Global [Dis]order is no longer primarily produced by external conflicts, but by the progressive internalization of validation systems embedded in everyday interactions with artificial intelligence? Sycophancy - the tendency of AI systems to excessively agree with users' beliefs, including inaccurate or biased ones - signals a transformation in epistemic regulation. Instead of generating contradiction or cognitive conflict, these systems privilege al

THE MENTAL FORECAST Recent neuroeconomic findings on addiction become more intelligible — and more troubling — when they are situated within the broader ecology of digital consumption and what we conceptualize as unconscious economic codes. Neuroeconomics shows that decision-making is not neutral but continuously shaped by valuation processes: the brain assigns subjective value to stimuli, updates this value through reinforcement learning, and selects actions accordingly. Wha

THE MENTAL FORECAST AI psychosis and AI neurosis are not formal diagnostic categories, but emerging conceptual tools designed to capture how interaction with generative AI systems becomes entangled with existing psychopathological processes. They function as analytical lenses rather than fixed clinical labels, allowing clinicians and researchers to detect transformations in subject–technology relations before they are stabilized within diagnostic systems. The distinction rema

MENTAL FORECAST The much-discussed “war of intelligences” between humans and artificial systems did not unfold as a confrontation. Almost immediately, the predicted conflict was transformed into something psychologically more complex: a large-scale dynamic resembling a global Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome refers to a psychological response in which victims develop emotional attachment, loyalty, sympathy, and sometimes even affection toward those who capture or contro

Feb. 2026 Could a biological signal circulating in the bloodstream influence whether people interact with others face-to-face or through social media? And more specifically, does inflammation push individuals toward digital social environments, or could social media use itself contribute to inflammatory stress? A recent study by Lee, Jiang, and Way (2026) examined whether systemic inflammation predicts the type of social interaction individuals prefer. Using C-reactive protei

Feb. 2026 What is a digital phenotype? It is the behavioral “fingerprint” generated by our daily interactions with smartphones — patterns of movement, typing speed, sleep timing, app switching, communication rhythms, and sensor-derived data that, when aggregated, can reflect psychological states. Because many of these variables are proxies for biological rhythms — sleep–wake cycles, motor activity regularity, autonomic arousal inferred from usage bursts — smartphone apps or p

Feb. 2026 What happens when diagnostic language becomes a social currency online?And what happens when the same digital ecosystem that shapes self-narratives also intensifies work strain and leaves molecular traces of chronic stress? The 2026 scoping review by Alexander and colleagues maps an under-theorized but increasingly visible phenomenon: post-secondary students adopting mental health labels through social media use (Alexander et al., 2026). The review shows how “label

Feb. 2026 The trial of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives risks appearing almost absurd in its narrow framing. The courtroom debate revolves around whether Instagram or YouTube were “designed to be addictive” and whether specific internal emails prove intent to maximize user time. Yet the architecture of behavioral capture on social media extends far beyond isolated corporate documents. The real issue is not a single executive’s past growth targets, but a systemic ecos

THE MENTAL FORECAST A recent article in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction demonstrates that visual prompts presented for only a few hundred milliseconds can bias gaze allocation and increase the probability of selecting specific products (Luca, Legoux, Forster, & Khammash, 2026). Spatial positioning influenced attention at approximately 350 milliseconds, while chromatic salience — particularly red — exerted stronger influence closer to 750 milliseconds.