Prof.Mathieu Guidère

Psynumia asks

Anxiety, despair, trauma, loneliness, eco-anxiety: in Santé mentale et relations internationales (Mental Health and International Relations, L’Harmattan, 2026), Mathieu Guidère shows that these forms of suffering do not belong to private life alone. They run through entire societies, are amplified by the attention economy and can be exploited to destabilise minds. The book argues for recognising mental health as a collective good to be protected. Psynumia asked him about the mental health of peoples and their leaders in the digital age.

1. Your book opens with the “genealogy of a blind spot”. Why has mental health been absent from the analysis of international relations for so long?

   Because the discipline was built on the idea of rational actors who calculate their interests and balances of power. Emotions were at best background noise and at worst a weakness to be eliminated. Mental health, for its part, belonged to medicine and private life, not to strategy.

   That separation no longer holds. Decisions are made by human beings, in societies shaped by fear, anger and exhaustion. Ignoring this dimension means misunderstanding an essential part of what happens between nations.

2. You devote one chapter to the mental health of leaders and another to that of peoples. What connects them?

   A leader is not an abstraction. Chronic stress, the isolation of power or an old trauma can weigh on how threats are perceived and how decisions are made, especially in a crisis. It is a security issue, not biographical curiosity.

   But leaders also govern populations whose psychological state shapes trust, cohesion and the acceptance of political choices. An anxious or disillusioned society does not react like a confident one. The two levels constantly echo each other.

3. The second part examines anxiety, despair, trauma, distrust, loneliness, attention and eco-anxiety. Why these emotions in particular?

   Because they are both widespread and politically active. Anxiety and eco-anxiety change our relationship with the future, despair and loneliness weaken social bonds, trauma leaves lasting marks after wars and attacks, and distrust undermines public discourse.

   Attention has a special place: it is the resource everyone is fighting over. Whoever captures attention steers emotions, and whoever steers emotions influences how reality is perceived.

4. You write that the information space is also an emotional space. What do you mean?

   Our online searches, the content we consume and our reactions on social media leave traces. They reveal what worries us, what outrages us and what attracts us. The attention economy has been built on these emotions, because anger, fear and outrage hold attention better than nuance.

   As a result, information no longer just informs: it acts on our mental states. And whatever acts on a population’s mental states becomes, in effect, a geopolitical lever.

5. In the third part, you discuss cognitive warfare and “weaponised pessimism”. What are they?

   Cognitive warfare targets minds rather than territory. It exploits a society’s psychological vulnerabilities, through information manipulation, to sow doubt, divide and weaken collective will. Medical and health intelligence, meaning knowledge of the health of a population or its leaders, becomes one of its tools.

   Weaponised pessimism is one of its most insidious forms: fostering the feeling that all is lost, that nothing works and that the future is closed. A society convinced of its own decline defends itself poorly. That is what I call cognitive destabilisation.

6. How can we protect ourselves? Your final part discusses cognitive security, defence, vigilance and resilience-building.

   First, we must recognise that mental health is a matter of sovereignty. A nation that lets its population’s psychological balance deteriorate exposes itself, just as it would by neglecting its defence or its energy supply.

   Cognitive security is a matter for institutions, cognitive defence for the ability to detect and counter manipulation, and vigilance for each of us. Resilience-building, finally, means strengthening the psychological resistance of individuals and societies: learning to recognise a manufactured emotion, to step back and to protect one’s attention. It is as much a task for education as for strategy.

7. Who is this book for?

   To public and private decision-makers, diplomats and military officers, clinicians and researchers, but also to anyone who senses that their unease about the world is not purely personal. The book sits at the crossroads of psychology and geopolitics, and that crossroads is exactly what is missing today if we are to understand our times.