Possibly relevant: Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Panel - The Price Of Modern Life Is Depression And Loneliness. One of the main points I got from that is that it is not at all clear that mental illness is growing, because one thing that has definitely been growing is the sensitivity of diagnosis and if there was any growth of mental illness it'd just be obscured by that. I'd add that alcoholism can mask a lot of smaller but more complicated mental issues, and since alcoholism is going down, those should be becoming more visible.

The scandal about /r/fatpeoplehate directed my attention to the obesity problem and its outcomes and one weird angle I figured out is that people are increasingly better at harming themselves with things that considered harmless. For example, we would be horrified if we saw a 8 year old child purchase vodka or drugs, but purchasing chocolate looks entirely innocent and harmless. And yet, it seems, more and more adults can kill themselves with chocolate and pizza. The interesting thing here is that sugar or similar things do not give such a high as alcohol or most drugs and the health effects are far more visible, a wide girth is more visible and less likely to be hidden by an Ugh Field than a scarred liver. So it sounds a lot like this is a particularly unlikely form of destructive hedonism, low pay-off and highly visible costs. Why is it becoming so popular then? The best answer I could figure out was ease. It is simply far easier than finding a drug dealer and less shameful than chugging whiskey I guess. The lesson is that even in self-destructive hedonism there is a growing trend to go for the easy and not too much fun (chocolate) not the hard and much fun (drugs). I think back in 1968 an acid-dropping hippie would have simply called that lazy or boring. My point is here a kind of a "not with a bang but with a whimper" kind of outcome, not particularly spectacularly ka-boomish Great Filters but simply the loss of energy and drive.