The answer is a neoliberal.

After the economic chaos of the 1970s, it was decided that the United States and Britain had become too collective. Previous decades had seen the introduction of the New Deal, which included the Social Security Act, strict regulations on banking and business, and the rising power of the unions. This collectively tilted economy sired a collectively tilted people: monkey-suited Corporation Man and his children, the hippies. For Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, saving ourselves meant rediscovering our individualist roots.

They cut taxes and regulations; they battled unions; they shrunk the welfare state; they privatized assets and weakened the state’s safety nets. They pursued the neoliberal dream of globalization — one free market that covered the earth. As much of human life as possible was to become a competition of self versus self.

In 1981, Margaret Thatcher said, “What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been toward the collectivist society.”

She then made a comment that bordered on the sinister. “Economics are the method: The object is to change the soul.” And that’s precisely what happened.

A 2010 study of 325 million American names by Jean Twenge of the University of San Diego and others found a sharp increase in parents giving their children uncommon names starting in 1983. Parents, suggested its authors, wanted them to “stand out and be a star.” The previous year “Jane Fonda’s Workout Video” appeared, selling over a million copies and heralding a fitness craze that’s still with us. The 1980s saw the rise of a self-esteem movement whose promoters promised that self-love would make America competitive again. We have been relatively narcissistic ever since. The individualist West had always been me-focused, but this was something new. Neoliberalism was a heightened form of individualism that brought great benefits and grave costs.

Today’s culture of selfies, influencers, side-hustles, the gig economy and the fetishization of entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s is all thoroughly neoliberal. And, for millions, the system has worked. Living standards have risen for many while global poverty has dropped by more than half, according to the World Bank. But inequality has increased, too. And the relentless focus on the individual, combined with an increasingly harsh economic environment for the ordinary person, has proved toxic for our mental health. We individualists are great at crediting ourselves for our victories, but we are just as good at blaming ourselves for failure. And today, exacerbated by the rise of social media, more and more of us are feeling like failures.

We call such sensitivity to signals of failure “perfectionism.” This mode of thinking is a predictor of self-harm, depression and suicide. A 2017 study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill of 40,000 students in the United States, Britain and Canada found that, between 1989 and 2016, the extent to which people felt they had to “display perfection to secure approval” had risen by a staggering 33 percent. An adult morbidity survey in England shows that between 2000 and 2014, the number of adults reporting self-harm more than doubled. In the United States rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents are rising. Despite widespread adoption of antidepressants since the 1980s, the United States’ suicide rate rose by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to the C.D.C.