first hand experience = anecdote, which in turn means it's a completely,m worthlessly unreliable indicator of a general factual and statistical situation. You'r

first hand experience = anecdote, which in turn means it's a completely,m worthlessly unreliable indicator of a general factual and statistical situation. You're confusing your specific impression from your life in a very tiny part of the vast tapestry that is the United States with a massive generalization that you claim is factual. Anyone here claiming that the Americans suffer from X or Y awful thing at absurd levels should actually try backing it up with a link or two to hard data that shows how much more these bad things apply to Americans than they do to those living in the (apparently) European paradise. As one comment a bit further down notes (no link to a source but at least they make a statistical claim) French people are on average among the world's biggest users of psych medication.