The Sickness We Aren’t Naming: Why Psychology is Silent on Greed

1. Introduction: The Unspoken Cause of Our Stress

I want to talk about something I almost never hear people in the psychology world talk about out loud: the mental health impact of greed and power on our entire culture. We are constantly advised to practice “self-care” and build “resilience,” but for so many, these tools feel like placing a bandage on a gaping wound. The feeling that our personal coping skills are no match for the scale of the problems we face is pervasive and, more importantly, accurate.

This raises a question I rarely hear my colleagues address publicly: If psychology is the field that studies human behavior, trauma, and unhealthy patterns, why are we so quiet about the psychological damage caused by systemic greed? Why is there so much focus on “coping skills” for the powerless, and so little honest language about the mental health impact of those in power? In this article, I want to explore a few key takeaways that reframe our mental health crisis not as an individual problem, but as a cultural one.

2. Takeaway 1: Our Focus on “Individual Resilience” is a Dangerous Distraction

So I have to ask: if the problems are systemic, why are we getting endless talk about “self-care” and “resilience”? This constant push conveniently places the burden of fixing a problem onto the people who are suffering from it. This relentless focus on “coping skills” for the powerless ignores the dysfunctional culture that manufactures chronic insecurity and constant economic threats. It suggests that if you are struggling, the failure is personal—a lack of resilience—rather than a predictable human response to an unhealthy environment.

This misdirection allows the architects of these harmful systems to escape scrutiny. By and large, my own profession has failed to name the source of this cultural sickness, focusing instead on treating its symptoms one person at a time.

The mental health crisis isn’t just about individuals with anxiety and depression trying to survive. It’s also about an unhealthy culture shaped by people whose greed, fear, and hunger for control go unchecked — and largely unnamed by the very profession that claims to understand human behavior.

This point is crucial because it validates the widespread feeling that individual solutions alone are not enough. It rightfully shifts the conversation from personal coping to public accountability for those whose hunger for power creates the conditions for our collective anxiety.

3. Takeaway 2: Systemic Cruelty Isn’t Politics—It’s a Psychological Pattern

When we view major social and political issues in isolation, we risk missing the forest for the trees. The fight over abortion access, cuts to food aid, and the housing crisis may seem like separate policy debates. However, when I examine them through a psychological lens, they reveal themselves as interconnected expressions of a single, unhealthy pattern: an addiction to power, control, and dehumanization.

This pattern manifests in numerous ways:

• Control over bodies: The overturning of Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion bans strip individuals of bodily autonomy, imposing a specific ideology over personal health and freedom.
• Control over basic needs: Politicians push to cut SNAP benefits for the most vulnerable, even as food prices rise, demonstrating a clear disregard for human necessity.
• Control over housing: Wall Street firms and large investors are treating homes like chips in a casino, buying up properties and squeezing regular people out of stable housing.
• Control over health: The profit-driven healthcare system is a maze of denied claims and delayed treatments, forcing sick people to fight a corporate bureaucracy instead of focusing on their illness.
• Control over government: Political movements like “Project 2025” represent a detailed plan to consolidate power and reshape government to serve a small, ideologically driven minority.

Recognizing these issues as symptoms of a single psychological pattern—a lust for control disguised as “values” or “policy”—is a crucial shift in perspective. It moves the conversation beyond disconnected political disagreements and toward identifying a widespread, destructive behavior that is poisoning our culture.

4. Takeaway 3: “TV Psychology” Is Turning Pain Into Entertainment

Mainstream media often presents a version of psychology that exacerbates the problem. The “Dr. Phil-style” model of television psychology turns individual suffering into a spectacle for ratings. This format brings people’s private pain into the public square, not for genuine healing or systemic critique, but for entertainment.

Its primary failure is its relentless focus on “fixing the dysfunctional individual” without ever questioning the dysfunctional culture that creates and perpetuates their pain. Now, I’m not here to diagnose any one person, but I am here to say:

…turning suffering into entertainment while ignoring the deeper systems that cause it is its own kind of moral failure.

This critique matters because it highlights how even seemingly helpful media can reinforce the misguided idea that our problems are rooted in our own deficiencies, rather than in the oppressive systems we are forced to navigate every day.

5. Conclusion: Redefining the Mental Health Emergency

My core point is this: the mental health crisis is not just happening inside our heads; it is baked into our institutions. The source of the illness is not a deficit of resilience in the population, but an excess of greed and a pattern of psychological traits—the entitlement, the lack of empathy, the need to dominate—among those in power. Systemic greed is a primary, untreated disorder, and the silence from the psychology profession on this matter is a significant part of the problem.

By focusing only on individual coping, professionals fail to name the abuse. By treating systemic cruelty as mere politics, they ignore a clear and destructive psychological pattern. It is time to ask why more psychologists aren’t publicly calling out the psychology of greed, and to reframe the conversation around the true source of our collective pain.

At what point do we start treating systemic greed and dehumanization as a mental health emergency, not just a political disagreement?