Most of what gets written about Taiwan focuses on its strategic value. The semiconductors everyone needs, the democracy everyone admires, the threat China poses. All true, all important.
What does not get much attention is simpler and harder to quantify: living in a place where your entire future might get decided by forces completely outside your control, and that reality just becomes part of the air you breathe.
It affects the young couple deciding against kids, the doctor considering jobs in other countries, the teenager who cannot sleep because they are old enough to understand what “reunification” actually means. This is not background context to the Taiwan story. For the people who live there, it is the story.
The international media treats Taiwan like a chess piece in some grand strategic game. Semiconductors, naval routes, democracy versus authoritarianism. All true, all important.
However there is another story underneath that almost never gets told — what happens to ordinary people when they live under the constant shadow of military threat, year after year, with no end in sight.
The Institute for National Defense and Security Research runs regular polls on how people view the China threat. Numbers show that 63.9 percent see China’s territorial ambitions as serious, and a third call it their top national security concern for the next five years.
However, there is a disconnect in the data that shows something important about the psychological state of the nation: 65 percent do not actually believe China is going to attack within five years.
This creates a strange mental space where the threat is real enough to worry about, but vague enough to ignore. People acknowledge the danger intellectually while continuing with their daily routines.
The problem is that this kind of chronic low-level stress does not just disappear because you are not actively thinking about it. It accumulates in ways that show up elsewhere — in health statistics, demographic trends, medication use and migration patterns.
The same polling found that 46.9 percent of people feel “indifferent” to China’s military exercises. One Taipei resident, Jeff Huang (黃杰夫), said it best: “I have been threatened by this kind of threats since I was a child, and I am used to it”.
Another man, surnamed Lin (林) described the drills as “like a daily routine.”
When China launched major military drills last year, Taiwanese television spent more airtime covering a local mayor’s recall vote and a parachuting accident in San Francisco than the warships encircling their nation. The stock market barely reacted.
This looks like resilience from the outside, but it is actually something closer to emotional exhaustion. Your brain can only maintain high alert for so long before it starts filtering out the danger signals just to function. That filtering comes with costs.
Researchers compared Taiwan with Ukraine and Poland during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They found post-traumatic stress levels in Taiwan were only slightly lower than in Ukraine — a country actively experiencing war.
More than half of Taiwanese respondents reported feeling distressed by war scenes in media. Taiwan has not been bombed, has not seen cities destroyed, has not had refugees fleeing across borders, but the psychological markers are already approaching those of an active conflict zone.
The brain does not distinguish well between imminent threats and anticipated ones. If you spend years wondering when the attack is going to come, your body’s stress response activates in similar ways to if the attack were already happening. This is not academic theory, it shows up in concrete health outcomes.
Over 1.65 million Taiwanese were using antidepressants by 2022, an increase of 320,000 from just five years earlier. The highest rates of use are among people under 30, which represents a significant reversal from typical patterns where older adults usually lead in medication use. Among junior-high school students, 54.3 percent report feeling pressure about their future, and their rates of anxiety and insomnia are 3.5 times higher than students who do not report this pressure.
Suicide became the second-leading cause of death for Taiwanese teenagers, with the proportion of teen deaths from suicide jumping from 12.5 percent to 18.4 percent in just five years. The standard explanations about academic pressure and social media apply everywhere, but Taiwan’s numbers are moving faster and in more concerning directions than comparable societies.
One study tracked the correlation between increased Chinese military activity near Taiwan and Internet search behavior.
Searches for depression, suicide and emigration all increased significantly during periods of heightened military pressure. People were literally asking search engines how to leave or how to end their lives in direct response to the military threat.
That is the immediate psychological damage, visible in real-time search data.
The longer-term damage shows up differently, in decisions people make about the most basic question: whether to bring new life into this situation at all.
Taiwan’s birth rate fell to 0.85 children per woman in 2023, one of the lowest fertility rates recorded anywhere in the world. For three consecutive years, more people have died in Taiwan than have been born, with only immigration preventing outright population decline.
The standard explanations focus on economics — high housing costs, demanding work culture, expensive childcare.
However, research examining mental health in the context of geopolitical threat finds that the vicarious experience of war — anticipating conflict in your own country creates high levels of anxiety that might inform major life decisions, including marriage and childbearing. This makes intuitive sense even if it is difficult to measure precisely.
The Institute for National Defense and Security Research has officially designated the population decline as a national security issue, not just a social or economic one.
The warning signs are already visible in how young Taiwanese think about their futures. The data shows a generation hedging their bets.
Surveys found that 50 percent of young Taiwanese people would be willing to work abroad.
This is not casual interest in international experience, it represents half of an entire generation keeping their options open for permanent departure.
Historically, emigration has functioned as Taiwan’s release valve during periods of political crisis. During the 1970s and 1980s, roughly 20 percent of college graduates left for advanced study overseas, and most never returned.
The pattern appears to be repeating, driven by the same underlying uncertainty about Taiwan’s long-term future.
International media coverage of Taiwan is pretty formulaic. Journalists show up for the military exercises, interview defense analysts about strategic implications, film B-roll of fighter jets and warships, then leave.
The psychological dimension barely registers because it does not fit standard news formats. There are no dramatic visuals for chronic stress, no specific incident to report for accumulated anxiety, no clear footage for demographic decline driven partly by existential uncertainty.
The government does not emphasize this angle either. They need to project confidence and stability to maintain international support and prevent panic domestically. So they avoid talking about the mental health crisis and demographic collapse, worried it would make Taiwan look weak.
However, ignoring a problem does not make it go away, and these trends are arguably as threatening to Taiwan’s survival as any military scenario.
Taiwan’s situation forces an uncomfortable question about how much psychological damage a population can absorb before it stops functioning as an effective society capable of defending itself.
The early indicators — antidepressant use, teen suicide rates, plummeting birth rates, emigration interest — suggest that damage is accumulating faster than most outside observers recognize.
This matters not just for Taiwan but for understanding how modern great power competition actually works when direct conflict remains too costly.
The weapons are not just missiles and warships, they are also sustained uncertainty, chronic stress and the slow erosion of hope about the future.
23 million people are living with this weight. Some go numb. Some get depressed. Some plan escape routes. Some keep going, because what else can you do?
This is the cost of being Taiwan. Not hypothetical. Not future. Right now, today, this is what it is doing to people and nobody is covering it because there is no explosion to film, no body count to tweet, no burning buildings to show at 6pm. That is the entire point of this kind of warfare. Conventional attacks create international responses. Psychological pressure just grinds away until one day the damage is too deep to reverse.
Beijing is counting on this pressure to break Taiwan without a fight, but Taiwan has survived worse odds before, and its people have shown they can adapt and maintain their identity under pressure that would have crushed other societies. The determination is still there — millions still choose to stay, to build lives, to resist in their own ways.
The question is whether that determination gets the support it needs, whether Taiwan and the world are going to recognize psychological warfare as the real attack it is and respond before the damage becomes irreversible. The war is not coming. It is already here, just fought with different weapons.
Noa Wynn is a researcher and journalist focusing on international security, social dynamics, and the forces shaping modern societies. He has reported on political and social issues across multiple regions, with a particular interest in how global pressures shape local realities.
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