How the pursuit of happiness has led to profound despair

It’s easy to mock such people and their problems — families capable of and willing to pay professionals between $200 and $600 a pop for 50-75-minute sessions of therapy designed to soothe the addled minds of their teenaged kids with study guides, mindfulness meditation, and techniques developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

But the rise of such elite treatment and coaching needs be seen as the flipside of the opioid epidemic and broadly harmonious with other socio-cultural trends that span America’s many economic and political divides: the widespread prescription of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, as well as the proliferation of diagnoses of attention deficit disorder (in both hyperactive and non-hyperactive forms), along with prescriptions of amphetamines (like Ritalin and Adderall) to treat it.

Add it all together and we get a picture of a country in which the pursuit of happiness — supposedly our founding birthright — is increasingly and inadvertently leading to lives marked by various forms of profound and debilitating unhappiness.