How the “Perfectionism Pandemic” Is Crushing Young PeopleSkip to Content
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PsychologyHow the “Perfectionism Pandemic” Is Crushing Young People<br>Our current achievement economy may deserve the blame
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By Kristen French
4:00 PM CDT on June 1, 2026<br>Share on Facebook<br>Share on X (formerly Twitter)<br>Share on Reddit<br>Share on Email<br>Share on Bluesky
Perfectionism among college students has become a public-health crisis, and the shape of our economy is likely to blame, according to new research. Rates of perfectionism have soared among college students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the past 35 years, with especially debilitating forms of this psychological phenomenon accelerating sharply since the early 2000s.<br>Featured Video
While the crisis in youth mental health is often blamed on social media, perfectionism deserves much of the blame, according to London School of Economics psychologist and study author Thomas Curran. Curran and his colleagues analyzed data from 307 studies conducted between 1987 and 2024, encompassing 82,939 American, Canadian, and British college students.<br>College students are increasingly paralyzed by external pressure to achieve, beset by fear of failure, fear of judgment from others and indecisiveness, Curran and his team found. To a lesser degree, they’re also more prone to striving—motivated to set high goals for themselves and to work hard to achieve them. Though striving is generally considered less distressing than paralysis over mistakes and fear of failure, both forms of perfectionism are linked to depression and anxiety, and these mental-health conditions have been rising in tandem with rates of perfectionism, the researchers found.<br>One of the main engines of this rise in perfectionism is neoliberalism, says Curran. Our highly individualistic and meritocratic society, which promotes achievement as the basis for self-worth, leads people to orient their lives around maximizing their market value, rather than meeting basic human needs such as autonomy, purpose, and connection.<br>Fluctuations in rates of perfectionism also seem to track changes in GDP per capita and income inequality, Curran and his team found. Shrinking GDP per capita was linked to increased striving, while growing income inequality was associated with perfectionistic paralysis and fear. The scientists published their results in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association.<br>I spoke with Curran about what perfectionism does to the mind, what makes our current moment a perfectionism pandemic, and what can be done about it.<br>Read more: “Why It Pays to Play Around”<br>How do you define perfectionism?<br>For many decades now, researchers have been squabbling over what perfectionism is. Some people think it’s a one-dimensional trait—essentially excessively high standards. Other people think there’s more to it than that. It’s a problematic relationship with ourselves where we have excessively high standards, but it’s also a problematic relationship with other people. So you expect too much of others, but also you think that others expect too much of you.<br>My personal opinion is that perfectionism is multidimensional. You can’t really understand perfectionism unless you understand these other more social elements, because it has just as much impact on the psyche of the perfectionist, if not more so. Essentially perfectionism has high levels of striving, so high self-set standards, but also concerns about mistakes, doubts about actions, and worries about other people’s opinions. Those two things together make perfectionism.<br>Where did this concept come from? When did we start becoming obsessed with perfectionism?<br>If you want to trace the lineage of perfectionism through modern psychoanalysis, you probably have to consider Karen Horney, a German clinical psychologist. She was the first person to really take on Freud’s ideas around the libidinal drive and penis envy and all that sort of stuff. You had to be very cautious and guarded in those days, particularly when you were criticizing high-profile men, but she basically said, “This is bullshit.” A lot of the neuroses she saw in her clinic were culturally conditioned rather than being the result of a tension between innate drives, desires, and reality. Actually what was going on, she said, was that people were bending themselves out of shape to conform to a societal ideal. It was interesting that it took a woman to observe this, because, of course, women in those days were the people who were most bent out of shape by societal ideals. She’s this really heroic figure in psychoanalysis, but over the years she has been forgotten, which speaks to the patriarchal thrust of psychology that still lives with us today.<br>Horney was a pioneer, and it was that conflict that she talked about...