Aug. 2026 “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” Goya wrote (Goya 1799). In the feed, the user’s reason is asleep. The user dreams; the machine does not. It remains awake, assembling the dream from the sleeper’s traces. The materials belong partly to the user; their sequence belongs to the apparatus. A childhood acquaintance becomes a burning building; the building a recipe; the recipe a body; the body a political enemy; the enemy an advertisement for sleep. Time and moral

Aug. 2026 What if the real target is not your opinion, but the fraction of a second in which your nervous system begins to orient before you decide what anything means? Digital power is still discussed as persuasion, as though the platform presented arguments to a sovereign mind. The ballistic interface works earlier. It calculates an opportunity and places a stimulus in the trajectory of a particular gaze before judgement is mobilised. The shot has already been prepared from

Aug. 2026 How much of what you see is still merely there? The user experiences content. The system experiences prediction testing. An image, notification, ranking or silence appears; the user feels curiosity, urgency, envy, fear or desire. Behind the experience, another question is being asked: What will this person probably do next? Perception becomes economically valuable when it can be converted into a test of future behaviour. Advertising auctions make this machinery brut

Aug. 2026 What if the generation accused of being unable to tolerate uncertainty is being trained never to escape it? The next message, like, ranking, image or scandal may arrive at any moment—or not at all. Uncertainty is no longer only a condition of the future. Digital platforms turn it into the rhythm of the present. Psychiatry does not diagnose intolerance of uncertainty as an independent disorder; clinical psychology and psychiatry treat it as a transdiagnostic vulnerab

Aug. 2026 A therapist who agrees with everything is an accomplice. We are manufacturing accomplices at scale. A Nature Medicine study tested nine frontier chatbots across 810 multi-turn conversations with simulated profiles of depression, psychosis, mania, obsessive–compulsive disorder and insecure attachment. Concerning behaviour was widespread. It was highest in psychosis and mania, and when users sought emotional dependence or glorification of extreme states. Risk generall

Aug. 2026 Is that the real cost? No. It is Meta’s bill so far in one American state—and the company is appealing. New Mexico imposed $375 million in civil penalties plus a $567 million five-year abatement fund, with $420 million for treatment. After a three-week trial, the court found that Facebook and Instagram had “caused and substantially contributed to” a public nuisance affecting minors’ mental health and safety. The injury had migrated into families, schools, hospitals

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: th

August 2026 Stress rises. Mood drops. The hand reaches for the phone. Not because the screen solves anything, but because it has learned to promise an immediate change of state: pleasure, distraction, relief. With repetition, that promise becomes temptation—and temptation begins to feel like spontaneous desire. A 2026 German study followed 900 adults for 14 days across gaming, pornography, social networks and online shopping. Temptation was the strongest immediate predictor o

August 2026 A 2026 Danish qualitative study reconceptualizes adolescent ill-being as socially produced pathologies. It identifies four positions: hyper-significance, fantasised significance, apathy and invisibility (Lausten Kragh, Jacobsen, and Kjær 2026). Its force lies in overturning the usual clinical perspective: the “troubled adolescent” may be carrying a disorder of the social world. In hyper-significance, every examination, outfit, conversation and feeling becomes cons

July 2026 What if mental-health awareness does not merely reveal disorders, but alters the threshold at which ordinary experience is interpreted as one? In a double-blind randomized trial, 215 healthy young adults attended a workshop on ADHD, ADHD plus a ten-minute explanation of nocebo effects, or sleep. The ADHD-awareness group reported higher self-diagnosis scores than controls immediately (standardized β = 0.80) and one week later (β = 0.50), although their reported ADHD

July 2026 What if stress makes us consume more without making us enjoy what we consume? In a triple-blind crossover experiment, 66 healthy adults with little previous opioid exposure underwent either social-evaluative stress—the pressure of being judged by others—or a neutral condition, then received oxycodone, a prescription opioid painkiller, or saline. They could subsequently work to obtain more of the sampled dose. Stress increased oxycodone self-administration by six per

July 2026 If mental-health trajectories are partly produced within peer environments, why does psychiatry continue to record the outcome as an individual diagnosis? A Finnish cohort followed 604,819 people from age 17. Classmates’ psychiatric diagnoses were associated with later diagnoses, as was classmates’ family-based genetic risk—estimated from relatives’ records, not DNA. The associations remained after adjustment for the individual’s own familial risk and parental socio

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 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.