Ripped Apart
25 September 2026
Cancel Culture: The Costs to Mental Health
A survey of 255 people who had been cancelled found that more than 80% said their mental health had been affected, a third had sought help from a mental health professional, 27% had taken medication as a result, and one in five scored in the most severe category for depression – against 3% of the general population.
Ripped Apart: Cancel Culture – The Costs to Mental Health reports an online survey run between June 2025 and April 2026, combining questions written for the study with standardised measures of depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress. To the authors’ knowledge it is the first survey to examine the effects of cancellation on members of the public with a specific focus on their mental health. The full report can be read below or downloaded as a PDF. Lord Young’s foreword is reproduced here in full.
Foreword
Carole Sherwood and Andrew MacLeod have carried out a really useful piece of research showing just how traumatic being cancelled can be. Of the 255 victims in their sample, 80% said their mental health had been adversely affected, with 27% reporting they’d had to take medication as a result. Even more alarming, 20% put themselves in the most severe depression category, compared to just 3% of the general population. Such is the impact of being thrown under a bus for wrongthink.
This comes as no surprise to me – and not just because the Free Speech Union has fought over 6,500 cases and I’ve talked to many of those people and heard their stories. The wellspring of the idea for the FSU came from my own experience of being cancelled in 2018. I was appointed to the board of the Office for Students, a new higher education regulator, and as soon as it was announced the offence archaeologists set to work, digging through everything I’d said or written trying to find evidence I was an unsuitable person to serve in this public role. Because I’ve been a provocative journalist for most of my career, it didn’t take them long to find a Tutankhamun’s tomb’s-worth of dodgy material and I started trending on Twitter.
Over the next few weeks I had to resign from one position after another and as I watched my career burn to the ground I longed for advice about what, if anything, I could do to salvage it. Should I get out there in the media and defend myself? Or was it better to lie doggo? Would apologising make things better or worse? Should I seek psychiatric help? Had anyone else been through something similar I could be put in touch with? No such advice was available, partly because cancel culture was still in its infancy. So when I’d recovered, I set about creating the organisation I’d desperately needed when I was at the eye of a Twitter storm. Six years later, demand for the FSU’s services has never been higher. We currently get 45 requests for help a week.
The first inkling that my experience was taking a toll on my mental health was when I stepped on the scales about seven days into my cancellation. At this point, a petition demanding that I be sacked from the Office for Students had attracted over 220,000 signatures. I looked down and discovered I’d lost half a stone. In a week! I wasn’t eating any less, but the sheer stress of being targeted in this way had led to rapid weight loss – the public humiliation diet. I theorised that it was an atavistic survival mechanism dating back to the Paleolithic period. When you’re ex-communicated by your hunter-gatherer band for breaching a sacred taboo, you need to run away as fast as you can before you’re ritually slaughtered – and shedding weight means you can run faster.
One source of anxiety was that the haters who were wishing me dead on social media at a rate of about 100 a minute would materialise outside my house, like an actual pitchfork mob in a Hammer House of Horror film. So whenever I left the house I wore a fur trapper hat which covered most of my face as a makeshift disguise. But of course the would-be Torquemadas never appeared in real life. It’s a lot easier to join a pile on in the virtual world than it is to confront someone in the flesh.
By the time the dust had cleared about three months later, I’d had to step down from five positions, including my day job running a free schools charity, and my income had been cut in half. With more time on my hands I began to notice that my perception of colours and sounds seemed to have become more intense, so paintings became brighter and music more intoxicating. Was that a trauma response? Hard to say and I never sought a diagnosis, but heightened sensory perception is sometimes reported by people suffering from PTSD. I note that a third of the sample in Carole and Andrew’s survey showed signs of PTSD.
One psychological reaction I experienced which I later discovered is very common was believing that I must deserve the misfortune that had befallen me. I carried out an internal audit of my behaviour dating back decades, searching for reasons why I should be made to suffer. A lecturer in psychology at UCL later explained that I was suffering from the ‘just world fallacy’ – the belief, very difficult to shed, that the universe is just and nothing good or bad happens without good reason. To preserve this illusion, those who’ve suffered a major reversal of fortune, as I had, look for things they’ve done that have brought this on themselves. I eventually discarded this belief, at which point I started to feel a lot better, and the first thing I say to people in the throes of cancellation is: “You haven’t done anything to deserve this and don’t start persuading yourself that you have.”
One thing that emerges from Carole and Andrew’s research is just how important your family is when you’re going through one of these nightmares. What did the severely depressed have in common? Less support from their families. Without the steadfast loyalty of my wife Caroline, I would have found my own cancellation immeasurably harder to deal with. I pity those who have to cope with such humiliation alone.
So I hope this report is a wake-up call to those who think cancellation is nothing more than holding people to account. Whatever the victims have said or done – and it’s nearly always said – they don’t deserve to find themselves wriggling at the end of a twitchfork. It’s a truly awful experience and we should be grateful to the 255 people who’ve gone through it for participating in this survey. Perhaps those who read it will think twice next time their finger is hovering over their phone, ready to cast some apostate into outer darkness.
Download this publication as a PDF ↓
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