Mental Health Campaigns Can Do More Harm Than Good
Constant mental health messaging can create the distress it aims to prevent.
Updated May 16, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
A year ago, I questioned whether we were overdoing mental health awareness. Since then, the evidence has only strengthened: The answer is yes.
To be clear, conversations about mental health remain vital in the right context. The danger lies in how broadcast and social networks amplify this messaging in ways that frequently cause more harm than good. Furthermore, current research typically evaluates a single campaign in a vacuum; we barely understand the cumulative psychological toll of being bombarded by competing mental health messages across multiple digital channels all day long.
While opening up discussions about mental health was a vital first step in reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek help, high-quality studies now indicate that these short-term benefits are often minimal or non-existent. The long-term effects of blanket awareness campaigns can be actively negative.
Education campaigns and negative outcomes
Recent research from the United Kingdom found that mental health education campaigns with adolescents can produce limited to no positive effects in the short term, and can produce negative outcomes in the long term. A scoping review by Guzman-Holst et al. (2025 ) identified that school-based group interventions intending to build resilience can lead to negative mental health impacts.
One major trial in the United Kingdom involving 153 schools and over 12,000 students (Deighton et al., 2025) found that a mental health awareness program led to no short-term improvements. More concerningly, it showed long-term negative effects: Students reported higher levels of internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and withdrawal, nearly a year after the intervention.
Encouraging people to reflect on distress may be inadvertently making people more distressed.
Pathologizing for clicks
If clinical experts struggle to design interventions that don't cause harm, the risk multiplies substantially when the incentives of the digital attention economy are combined with awareness and influence campaigns.
Many awareness-raising efforts now happen via commercial campaigns designed to sell wellness products or services. Mental health terms, language, and approaches can be used as messaging and framed as a necessary tool for self-care. Some advertising campaigns even employ voice actors who sound visibly distressed while listing routine, everyday hassles, urging viewers or listeners to pause, focus on these minor stressors, and reflect on their own hidden anxieties.
Unfortunately, some public figures raising awareness often lack a basic understanding of the underlying research—not just regarding symptoms, but regarding the established risks of poorly executed psychological interventions.
This creates a number of risks. Research would indicate that some people are more susceptible to the negative outcomes (people who are anxious, suggestible) and that adolescents are more likely to experience impacts (positive or negative) of campaigning efforts.
Algorithms naturally prioritize content that triggers strong emotional reactions, creating a feedback loop. Users are constantly encouraged to find pathology in their daily lives. Adolescents, as well as naturally anxious or suggestible individuals, are particularly vulnerable to these messaging campaigns.
Theoretical explanations
Why do well-intentioned campaigns produce worse outcomes? Four distinct theories offer an explanation.
Concept creep, initially described by Haslam (2016), explains how the definitions of harm-related concepts (like abuse, bullying , and trauma ) gradually expand to include a range of milder and completely normal experiences. Over time, less severe symptoms are under a diagnostic umbrella (like treating common sadness as depression ), while qualitatively different experiences coalesce into a single description (interpersonal conflict becomes trauma).
This expansion does not identify previously undetected disorders; it creates them by encouraging healthy individuals to report symptoms that are simply within the normal range of human experience.
- Prevalence Inflation Hypothesis
The prevalence inflation hypothesis suggests that rising rates of mental illness reflect changing interpretations of distress rather than a genuine increase in disease (Foulkes & Andrews, 2023). Constant exposure to messaging encourages hyper-vigilance for signs of anxiety. Then, people reinterpret common emotional fluctuations as indicators of a clinical condition.
Over time, adopting these broader interpretations fosters a self-identification with illness that shapes behavior (such as avoiding stressful interactions), which further reinforces the perceived symptoms. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more we look for illness, the more illness we find in everyday behaviours and emotions.
Another explanation is the nocebo effect (Petrie & Rief, 2019), rooted in response expectancy theory. This is similar to the placebo effect : If you expect a specific cue to cause a symptom, your brain will often produce that sensation. In mental health contexts, being told to monitor for "hidden signs of illness" creates negative expectations.
Lab studies show that individuals who are more anxious or suggestible are particularly vulnerable to this; when they learn about a condition, they are more likely to experience it.
- Illness Self-Labeling Model
The illness self-labeling model (Ahuvia & Link, 2025) explains what happens once someone accepts a diagnosis. When you adopt a label, you activate a set of cultural beliefs about what that illness means. If the cultural script says your condition is a permanent brain glitch that saps your energy, agency, ability to focus, or capacity to interact with other people, you may internalize that helplessness.
Replaying the cultural script reshapes how you interpret your symptoms. Someone with a diagnosis (or self-diagnosis) might stop doing things they enjoy because it doesn’t align with perceptions about what people with that diagnostic label can or should do, effectively trapping oneself in a feedback loop that reinforces the disorder through an identity shaped by the label.
While these theories approach the problem from different psychological perspectives, they converge on similar mechanisms that explain why mental health awareness campaigns could be counterproductive. In their recent synthesis, Sandra & Inzlicht (2026) explain the common mechanisms across these four theories. By providing "converging explanations for a societal problem," they help to explain why awareness campaigns could be causing more mental health problems than they solve. The three common mechanisms are:
We must distinguish between public awareness and personal support. Public campaigns are often broad, shallow, and increasingly, the evidence indicates they could be counterproductive. The cumulative effect of many and varied campaigns could be even worse. High-quality personal conversations, like those that happen in the privacy of a trusted personal or therapeutic relationship , allow for nuance and individual context that a generic campaign can never provide.
A growing body of cognitive research demonstrates that forgetting is a highly adaptive, essential skill. Memory researchers treat active forgetting as a critical mechanism for emotional regulation . The brain naturally dampens the sting of negative experiences over time. Constant generic messaging could disrupt this natural process that lets difficulties and stressors fade quickly or over longer periods of time. When campaigns force us to continually reflect on daily stress, they may inhibit our capacity to let minor distress naturally fade into the background.
Conversations about well-being are essential when they happen at the right time, with the right people. But scrolling through daily reminders of psychological distress piped directly to your screen and earbuds probably does more harm than good.
Ahuvia, I. L., & Link, B. G. (2025). The mental illness self-labeling model: A conceptual model for studying the effects of mental-illness self-labeling on clinical outcomes. Clinical Psychological Science, 13(6), 1031–1050.
Deighton, J. et al. (2025). Effectiveness of School Mental Health Awareness Interventions: Universal Approaches in English Secondary Schools. Government Social Research.
Foulkes, L., & Andrews, J. L. (2023). Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis. New Ideas in Psychology, 69, 101010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2023.101010
Foulkes, L. Winterburn, I., Sandra, D., Inzlicht, M., Andrews, J. L., & Carolina Guzman, C. (2026). The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts. Nature Reviews Psychology, 5, 173–184.
Guzman-Holst, C., Streckfuss Davis, R., Andrews, J.L. and Foulkes, L. (2025), Scoping review: potential harm from school-based group mental health interventions. Child Adolescent Mental Health, 30, 208-222.
Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27 (1), 1–17.
Haslam, N., & Tse, J. S. Y. (2026). Concept creep and the calibration of harm. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 15(1), 1–11.
Petrie, K. J., & Rief, W. (2019). Psychobiological mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects: Pathways to improve treatments and reduce side effects. Annual Review of Psychology, 70(1), 599–625.
Sandra, D. A., & Inzlicht, M. (2026). Why Mental Health Awareness Can Harm: Converging Explanations for a Societal Problem. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 15(1), 17-22.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.