“You can’t abandon the concept of normality, or societies will just completely fall apart,” said developmental psychologist and social science scholar J.D. Haltigan.

There has been a tremendous push in mental health to destigmatize mental illness, he said, and people are encouraged to regard themselves as “some sort of heroic person for having [mental] disorders.”

This is true especially for mood disorders like depression and anxiety. People nowadays increasingly define themselves through mood disorders—especially women, who often are more prone than men to depression and internalization of anxiety, he said.

This apparent valorization of mental illness is closely linked to a growing feminization of society, Haltigan said. Males, he told me, “tend to systemize more,” while women “tend to be more empathetic.”

But in recent decades, that empathy has been weaponized, he argued: “We’ve come to basically hijack the feminine ethic of care, the feminine impulse to be empathetic.”

He said this may explain why anti-ICE protests tend to skew disproportionately towards females.

At the same time, he said, masculinity and the enforcement of laws and standards became demonized in society.

Haltigan’s departure from the University of Toronto in 2023 coincided with his growing concerns about what he described as increasing ideological pressures in academic research and restrictions on what researchers could say about mental health and early child development.

In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss these shifts in society, their impacts, and the role of social media in fueling these changes.

Now, Haltigan is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.