Existential Distress Is Real and Increasingly Common
Catching up to a psychological concern that most clinical discourses miss.
Posted April 30, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
A growing body of clinical research is naming a kind of psychological suffering that the diagnostic manual cannot. It is often called existential distress, meaning-related or existential suffering, or simply an existential crisis. Whatever the label, the phenomenon is increasingly understood as a distinct concern rather than a variant of depression or anxiety .
We are living in an existentially intense time. Artificial intelligence is making many question what makes humans irreplaceable. Others find themselves disoriented by a sea of misinformation that is corroding trust in communication, social media , knowledge, and science itself. Some are sitting with ongoing wars, rising political tensions, and an ecological crisis whose scale resists comprehension. These phenomena reflect a breakdown of meaning, relationship, and ways of being in the world together, rather than individual psychopathology.
The 2023 article "Existential Issues in Psychotherapy ," published in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience , frames it for clinicians directly. 1 Existential issues, which are psychological concerns related to death, meaning or meaninglessness, choice, responsibility, identity , and connection or isolation, are common across diverse healthcare populations and clinical settings. The authors remind clinicians of the value of recognizing and addressing such concerns rather than collapsing them into adjacent diagnoses.
Existential distress is real
The clinical research is, in many ways, only beginning to catch up with what these conditions are producing in real lives.
A 2023 meta-analysis in the Journal of Research in Personality by He and colleagues, drawing on hundreds of studies with 75,000-plus research participants, found a more nuanced pattern than is often assumed. 2 The presence of meaning in life is significantly associated with less psychological distress, as many of us would expect. Yet the search for meaning, in the absence of having found it, is significantly positively associated with anxiety, depression, and other negative emotional concerns. The active state of searching for meaning can itself be a marker of suffering rather than a path out of it.
This finding is worth pausing on. Many people are actively searching for meaning in an absurd era with sociocultural conditions that make this intimate search particularly hard, and have not yet arrived at anything that truly holds. The research suggests that this state of seeking is itself psychologically painful, which means that the rising tide of existential concerns in contemporary life is not just an abstract cultural observation.
Existential distress is showing up in clinical settings as a measurable form of suffering.
What this looks like in practice
Empirical findings can be precise about what they measure, but they often fail to capture what the experience feels like from the inside. Most clients who present with existential distress do not arrive describing meaning-related deficits explicitly. People often arrive describing something quieter and harder to name.
Existential disturbances may linger after the workday ends and return after the vacation that was supposed to solve all of one's problems. For some, it shows up on Sunday afternoons, in lives that look correct on paper and yet feel psychologically uninhabited or empty. For others, it surfaces in the strange new register of contemporary life: the dread of opening the news, the disorientation of doing work that an algorithm may soon be doing, and the painful recognition that one is raising children into a future whose stability cannot be assumed.
Sometimes it is the harder-to-name grief for futures and certainties that were quietly lost. Alternatively, existential suffering can emerge in the early hours of the morning around the deeper questions one has been postponing about meaning, mortality, and personal or collective responsibility.
Interestingly, this is an older human experience that the depth-psychological tradition has long described. Carl Jung wrote extensively about the suffering of the human soul that has been kept waiting too long. Lionel Corbett, a contemporary Jungian analyst, devoted an entire book, The Soul in Anguish, to the implications of this kind of suffering. 3
What the empirical literature is now confirming, and what contemporary global conditions are revealing at scale, is that this is neither a rare nor a purely private form of suffering. It is showing up, increasingly, as the texture of ordinary life.
A few things follow from taking existential distress seriously as a recognizable psychological phenomenon rather than a vague life-stage complaint.
The first is that managing mental health symptoms while existential concerns remain untouched will leave people feeling that something essential is unaddressed. Some forms of suffering operate at a different layer than the cognitive and behavioural layer that mainstream therapy is built to address.
The second is that existential issues are not a luxury topic reserved for well-off clients who have already resolved their other problems. The research suggests they often underlie the other problems, and in this case, that the active state of searching for meaning, especially in conditions that make the search difficult, is itself a measurable form of suffering.
This means people in this state are not failing to cope. They are encountering a kind of trouble that the standard frameworks for distress are not equipped to meaningfully engage with.
The third is that, in social and political conditions like the ones we are living through, the prevalence of existential distress is no longer marginal. It is showing up across client populations, clinical settings, age groups, and increasingly outside clinical settings altogether, in workplaces, friendships, and within quiet solitude. Recognizing what it is and when it shows up is genuinely useful for helping people feel less crazy.
If you found yourself recognizing your own experience in any of this, the experience is real, it is increasingly well-documented in the research, and it is not the kind of issue you can think your way out of alone.
The examined life, it turns out, is not a luxury. In times like these, it is often the only honest response to being given a life at all.
Schnipke, B., & MacKay, M. (2023). Existential issues in psychotherapy. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience , 20 (1–3), 72–75.
He, X.-X., Wang, X., Steger, M. F., Ji, L.-J., Jing, K., Liu, M., & Ye, B. (2023). Meaning in life and psychological distress: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality , 104 , Article 104381.
Corbett, L. (2015). The soul in anguish: Psychotherapeutic approaches to suffering . Chiron Publications.
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Mark Shelvock, RP, MACP, MA , is a Registered Psychotherapist based in Ontario, specialising in existential, psychodynamic, and attachment-informed psychotherapy
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.