Mead argued that if a society’s most pressing problems were anxiety and stress, it meant that it had escaped humanity’s traditional enemies of warfare, famine, and disease. The rising significance of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in modern life was, she argued, not a sign of growing mental illness, but a sign of progress. It led to “a world in which no individual feels that he need be hopelessly brokenhearted, a failure, a menace to others or a traitor to himself… a society where there will be freedom from want and freedom from fear.”
