Britain is in the grip of an anxiety boom. Last year, almost 250,000 patients were referred for NHS counselling for “generalised anxiety disorder”, up from just under 190,000 four years earlier. Private providers and mental health apps are mopping up the overflow. Around five in 10 adults now use health apps, more than a third have tried AI chatbots for psychological support, and the UK mental health app market alone is already worth roughly $300 million and growing rapidly.

Employers are beginning to share their employees’ stress. In the years since the pandemic, there has been a dramatic rise in people out of work with poor mental health. NHS England’s clinical lead for Talking Therapies, Dr Adrian Whittington, says demand has reached “unparalleled levels”, with six million suffering from anxiety. He nevertheless urges more people to come forward to get help.

The swelling numbers, he suggests, “also reflect progress in tackling stigma”. But that explanation ignores a cultural shift in how distress is discussed. Particularly for younger generations, mental health labels have become a social currency to be displayed proudly in social media bios. As writer Freya India observes, “genuine conversations about mental health have been cheapened, monetised and trivialised into trends on TikTok and lifestyle accessories.” On TikTok alone, the hashtag #mentalhealth has racked up more than 110 billion views.

Many of these problems were fuelled by the pandemic. Covid policy deliberately suppressed the social instincts that make us human. Ordinary contact was recast as dangerous: children became “superspreaders”, friends potential vectors of disease. The instincts to gather, touch and share space were treated as irresponsible. Standing two metres apart in taped boxes, sanitising hands every few minutes and eyeing anyone who coughed in public trained people to see others not as companions but as biohazards.

The tendency to hunker down behind a screen for hours each day is understandable, given the devastation in Britain’s towns and cities. Since the pandemic began, more than 2,200 pubs have vanished, with closures continuing at roughly one a day. More widely, the hospitality sector is still suffering from long Covid. In a landscape like this, the seductive escapism of the phone becomes even more alluring.

The great Victorian comic writer Jerome K. Jerome captured the absurdity of health anxiety in Three Men in a Boat. His narrator, browsing through a medical textbook, becomes convinced he is suffering from every disease listed, “from ague to zymosis”. Alarmed, he consults a doctor who prescribes a simple cure: eat a good beefsteak, drink a pint or two of stout, take plenty of exercise and stop thinking about yourself so much.

This lesson is enduring and suggests the NHS may be looking for solutions in the wrong place. Britain does not need more therapy sessions. It needs more of the institutions that quietly held us together for centuries: pubs, charity shops and clubs. The cure for anxiety won’t be found in NHS sessions, a private therapist’s couch or a mindfulness app. Instead, it will come in the simple advice Jerome’s doctor prescribed long ago: get out of the house, meet your friends and stop thinking about yourself so much.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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