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Over decades in healthcare, I’ve watched the definitions of “mental health” stretch, contract, and evolve like a living map. Depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and bipolar disorder once sat at the center of our attention. Today, however, I’m noticing a different kind of crisis -- one that perhaps slips through the traditional diagnostic mesh. I can only describe it as radicalization, not in the geopolitical sense alone, but as a pattern of cognitive capture that rewires how people relate to the world and to one another.
Many of us have witnessed this up close, and it seems to be more pervasive these past few years. A close friend of mine -- compassionate, rational, grounded, a family-oriented person -- has become consumed by outrage toward a specific foreign government. Not concerned, not critical, but consumed. Every conversation, every group text, funnels toward his grievance. Every relationship is strained by the gravity of his fixation. My friends and I found ourselves launching a separate group-text (with him excluded) not about the political issue, but about what has happened to him. It feels less like a belief and more like a brain takeover.
This isn’t simply addiction. It’s not quite obsession. It carries shades of both, but the behavioral signature is different. And so I find myself asking: Is this a new mental health condition emerging from modern information ecosystems? And if so, does our industry have a role in addressing it?
Nir Eyal’s work in the book Hooked illuminated how digital platforms are engineered with precision and intent -- variable rewards, frictionless loops, identity cues -- to keep us scrolling. Those techniques, deployed at global scale and optimized by machine learning, do something curious to the brain. They don’t just capture attention. They shape valence: what we fear, what we chase, who we trust, and who we learn to distrust.
In this design landscape, radicalization is almost a predictable downstream effect. The platforms don’t deliberately seek to polarize, but polarization is sticky. It produces engagement. And engagement is the currency of the realm.
But the real cost shows up in human behavior. Just this week, many saw a viral video of a college student confronting and assaulting Dave Portnoy mid–pizza review. Whatever one thinks of the personalities involved, the underlying phenomenon is alarming: a young person so cognitively saturated by a worldview that it overrides judgment, empathy, and consequences. He was later arrested and expelled. The tragedy isn’t only his action -- it’s the infrastructure of thought that carried him to that moment.
Clinically, we’ve long understood how distorted thinking can lead to isolation. But this new form of radicalization is different. It weaponizes social connection itself. The individual doesn’t withdraw from community; he seeks to convert it. He begins recruiting friends into the same vortex of outrage. Those who resist become antagonists. Familiar political labels are not the core issue -- the pattern is.
This dynamic has the scent of a cognitive-behavioral syndrome: fixation, compulsive information consumption, emotional dysregulation, and impaired relational functioning. It escalates not through brain chemistry alone but via engineered digital stimuli. And while we have medications for mood disorders and psychoses, they don’t necessarily address the roots of this new phenomenon. We can say: let's get rid of or do a better job of regulating social media...but that's not happening anytime soon.
Our industry historically focuses on diagnosable, biologically grounded conditions bracketed by distinct features. But the world is changing. Technology has created new modes of cognitive strain, attention hijacking, and emotional overload that might not necessarily fit neatly into DSM categorizations and classifications.
So here is my open question to colleagues across new products, R&D and commercial: Do we need to broaden our conception of mental health to include digitally induced cognitive dysregulation -- and develop therapeutic approaches accordingly?
I’m not suggesting a pill to “fix” political polarization. Political debates are healthy and necessary. Nor should we pathologize normal disagreements. But if radicalization behaves like a disorder, producing compulsive behavior, impaired judgment, and social dysfunction, might there be novel mechanisms worth investigating?
Imagine treatments or interventions aimed at:
These don’t have to be pharmaceuticals. They could be digital therapeutics, biomarkers of attentional dysregulation, or neurocognitive training platforms developed in partnership with tech companies.
We often talk about unmet medical need in terms of disease prevalence, economic burden, or treatment gaps. But radicalization, as a mental health phenomenon, is quietly breaking families, friendships, and communities. If that isn’t unmet need, I’m not sure what is.
I’m not prescribing an answer. I’m inviting a conversation. A new frontier of cognitive health is unfolding, and the biotech and pharma community has the scientific imagination and translational engine to explore it responsibly.
If the digital age has created new forms of cognitive harm, then perhaps we have an obligation -- or at least an opportunity -- to consider new forms of cognitive healing.
