A response to The Harper Review’s Autumn 2025 proposition, “We should still believe in progress.”
Dear editors,
This summer, I read Joan Didion’s The White Album in the mountains of Appalachia, trying to outrun my ailing mind. Exhausted by war abroad and malaise at home, I found a strange symmetry in her dispatches from another age of upheaval. Staggered between examinations of Californian irrigation and O’Keeffe paintings, Didion confessed to losing her narrative compass:
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement.
After reading her excerpt a passage from her own 1968 psychiatric report, it made sense why migraines and vertigo bled into the pages of her reporting. Didion inscribes personal and collective mental fracture into the cultural record; sickness of the age ran through her own body and mind. She wrote through spiritual confusion; I struggled to write at all. But what I realized, many cigarettes and far less bourbon later, is that the confusion suits. It is where the American appetite lives—an itch for reinvention that only grows sharper when the political present feels unsatisfying. A settled nation is a stagnant one, and ours has never tolerated stasis well.
I have worn many hats in this malaise, sometimes literally. A Trump-branded cowboy hat at CPAC in 2023, drunk on the thrill of small government while riding a mechanical bull. A pepto-pink pussyhat at the Women’s March in 2017. A Russian revolutionary Budenovka at 14. That one just speaks for itself, doesn’t it. Each hat was a way to keep pace with an exhausted political psyche that lurched between hope and disappointment: the boisterous zeal of a teenage communist, the doomscrolled paranoia of a partisan foot soldier, the siloed cynicism of a libertarian. The costumes change, but the concern remains. How do we heal a fractured national psyche?
We are a nation in the throes of polysubstance use, PTSD, schizophrenia, anorexia, ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, and more—a body politic on life support. Nearly one in four US adults experienced a mental illness in the past year, and one in three for those between 18 and 25 years old. These are not just statistics. They are the hidden architecture of civic life, shaping how we work, how we love, and how we imagine our future.
An unwell psyche manifests as political disillusionment: apathy not born of laziness, but of trauma. I know that “trauma” has become a tired word, dismissed as the grammar of an oversaturated therapy culture, over-applied to every minor discomfort we experience in our largely comfortable modern world. But we are a people conditioned to calamity. Generations come of age with Columbine and Sandy Hook, with 9/11 and endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the Great Recession gutting our American dreams, with the opioid crisis, the climate crisis, January 6, Covid-19, and a politics of permanent outrage surging into violence. It is not over-therapizing to say such events have left us collectively raw.
Structural explanations of disillusionment—polarization, inequality, corruption—are real but incomplete without the psychic dimension. My generation, raised on crisis and disappointment, has inherited a delicious distrust in institutions. Politics, for many of us, feels less like a path toward solutions than a trigger for exhaustion. Nearly three-quarters of Americans report stress about politics, two-fifths avoid the news altogether due to anxiety, and only a quarter still believe in upward mobility. This crisis is self-reinforcing: a sick nation cannot summon hope for progress, and the absence of progress only deepens our sickness.
Reviving progress is not optional—it is the only treatment that offers a way forward. For decades, America has cycled through other prescriptions: nostalgia for an idealized past, the numbing impact of consumerism, the balm of therapy-speak. None of these will work. Nostalgia shackles us to grievances, consumerism leaves us lonelier, and even the most sophisticated therapeutic language often individualizes what is, at its core, a collective wound. Despair cannot be our national destiny, in a country so rich with impossible resolve, and progress is not naïveté.
Progress does not deny our sickness, but insists on healing it in motion—through policies that expand access to care and opportunity, through promoting trust in democratic institutions, and through civic rituals that, for better or worse, bind us in shared purpose.
A sick nation can be healed if we choose, against the weight of despair, to treat progress not as a relic of a lost century, but as the medicine we so urgently need.
Convalescingly,
Sophia Gutierrez
Image: Joseph L. Boyd, Medicine Chest, watercolor, colored pencil, pen and ink, and graphite on paper, 1940 (National Gallery of Art, DC).