BOOKS WATCHDOG | The Mental Forecast

Jan. 2026

E.U.LABORATORY’s Books Watchdog monitors recent academic publications that illuminate how contemporary economic and technological architectures are reshaping mental health. Rather than reviewing books as isolated intellectual objects, this watchdog reads them as signals — early indicators of structural transformations in belief systems, attention regimes, and psychosocial risk. The present selection converges on a shared diagnosis: digital capitalism increasingly governs not through explicit coercion, but through the internalization of productivity, success, and visibility norms.

Across political economy, education studies, and media research, productivity imperatives are no longer external demands but psychological expectations embedded in platforms, algorithms, and visual metrics. What is framed as innovation or personalization functions as biopolitical normalization, shaping subjectivity before critical distance can be established. Mental strain appears here not as an accident, but as an anticipated outcome of systems designed around performance and continuous evaluation.

Works such as Human Resources Development in a Digital Age and Future of Work in Asia show how “upskilling” and “adaptability” are reframed as moral duties rather than strategic responses to economic change. AI-assisted monitoring, dashboards, and permanent assessment transform work into a continuous test of adequacy. This regime installs a chronic sense of insufficiency, a central driver of technostress, burnout, and self-blame, while structural constraints are translated into individual psychological responsibility.

In education, Artificial Intelligence and Human Agency in Education: Volume Two and Critical Perspectives on EdTech in Higher Education document a parallel shift. Learning analytics and AI personalization promise equity and well-being, yet operate through continuous data extraction, comparison, and ranking. Attention and behavior become measurable and optimizable, producing a state of permanent cognitive load. Agency is not abolished but redirected toward self-surveillance and anticipatory conformity, with anxiety and identity fragmentation emerging as structural effects.

Platform labor studies deepen this diagnosis. Cheap Labour Regime in Platform Capitalism and Uberization and Overexploitation reveal how algorithmic management converts precarity into continuous psychological pressure. Ratings, opaque allocation systems, and exclusion threats generate high-frequency evaluation environments in which fear governs behavior more efficiently than direct control. Autonomy becomes a narrative cover for overexploitation, while stress, dissociation, and depressive trajectories follow predictable social-epidemiological patterns.

The visual and affective dimension of this regime is further clarified in Trauma in the Age of Social Media in Sub Saharan Africa. Trauma circulates through digital virality, exposure, and harassment rather than remaining tied to singular events. Images and narratives are amplified without symbolic containment, producing collective hypervigilance and emotional contamination. This confirms a central E.U.LABORATORY hypothesis: visual regimes under platform capitalism actively participate in mental health degradation by restructuring perception and meaning, not merely by increasing stimulation.

Taken together, these publications indicate a systemic transformation of mental health determinants. The dominant risk factor is no longer limited to economic insecurity or screen time, but lies in the colonization of belief systems — success beliefs, performance norms, and visibility imperatives — installed through digital infrastructures. The Mental Forecast is therefore unambiguous: short-term escalation of technostress and anxiety; medium-term burnout, dissociation, and depressive syndromes; long-term normalization of psychic exhaustion as a social condition.

This Books Watchdog underscores a critical conclusion: mental health cannot be meaningfully approached at the individual level without confronting the economic, algorithmic, and visual architectures that shape attention, evaluation, and identity. What these books collectively expose is not a failure of adaptation, but a crisis of governance — where alienation is transformed into an internal psychological state, continuously measured, managed, and rendered profitable.

Liviu Poenaru, PhD

References

Adarkwah, M. A., Amponsah, S., Huang, R., & Thomas, M. (Eds.). (2025). Artificial intelligence and human agency in education: Volume two — AI for equity, well-being, and innovation in teaching and learning. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-9251-4

Bernard, S. (2025). Uberization and overexploitation: Racial platform capitalism in Paris, London and Montréal. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-99724-2

Fung, C. Y., Lim, A. S. S., Lim, W. M., & Cheong, H. F. (Eds.). (2025). Future of work in Asia: Transforming work models, workforce dynamics and workplace technology. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-95804-5

Novianto, A. (2025). Cheap labour regime in platform capitalism: How flexible accumulation fuels the super-exploitation of gig workers. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-1841-8

Sousa, M. J. (Ed.). (2025). Human resources development in a digital age. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-92548-1

Tembo, N. M. (Ed.). (2025). Trauma in the age of social media in Sub-Saharan Africa: Narrative and representation. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-95508-2

Thomas, D. A., & Laterza, V. (Eds.). (2025). Critical perspectives on EdTech in higher education: Varieties of platformisation. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-88173-2