Community is there and possible. We just don't know how to reach it.
Young people (or, at least, young people who don't feel the need to work 80-hour work weeks) do actually have a significant sense of community since they still have time to be active in communities. Personally, knowing that I have people I could arrange to be around on short notice who actually care about me is an incredible boost to my mental health.
We need a new religion. Nothing out there right now is cutting it.
It creates a rather sad outlook on life.
For me, the summary would be: America loves itself too much. Most "mental ill" Americans I met were, simply put, just too full of themselves. Its a tragic thing to have to explain, but the mirror seems to be one of the most dangerous weapons of all, and .. Americans sure do love that mirror.
So perhaps the (super-)self awareness of your average USA-branded citizen is one factor. I note that in other nationalistic/adornment identity- cultures, there are also 'mental illness' lunatic fringes (literally, pun!) which - in my opinion, are meta-physically transferrable - infections at a mental level - and therefore the best remedy is indeed an active and positive attitude about mental conditions.
For the most part, in lieu of pscyho-pharma-industrial dependence, I just travel. It totally works.
I would say that for minor mental conditions (anxiety, depression, grief), psychiatric drugs exist solely because talk therapy is still primitive and ineffective.
It's much easier, logistically, to give a statin to a group of obese people, than it is to help each individual increase their self-esteem, start taking care of themselves, and teaching them the mindset skills they need to to make sustained changes.
Pills never fix the root problem. Some (more indigenous) cultures are very pro-grief, so when somebody loses a loved one, other villagers and even strangers try to support them, emotionally, so they can get through it. This is simply not the case in America, where people never receive the support they need and take pills to stop feeling so bad. The problem is an emotionally repressed culture, which can't be fixed with pills. Yet nobody actually tells it like it is.
Your advice to people sounds like "just stop being fat", but what specifically should they do to take care of themselves and what are those changes? The people prescribing the drugs might not know or might've told them something that doesn't work and lost credibility.
Do you know of any other authors/philosophers who explore this idea more fully?
That doesn't indict communities and their social and emotional importance.
If anything, it proves GP's point. The coexistence of dysfunctional communities and no-community within a culture actually seems pretty congruent. It just points to both of these being caused by dysfunction in the culture.
Nearly every community is healthy and wonderful if they're like you in the ways you care about and you have membership. Nearly every community is dysfunctional if it's different in the ways you care about and you lack membership.
Most people I know seem to define "community" based purely on geography and some localist shared identity. I, personally, am not a fan of this. I find it too arbitrary and and far too likely to attempt to co-opt me into supporting things directly against understanding of my interests. I fully understand why some other people value such things.
And yes, it's possible that I'm just an asshole that nobody ever wants in their community.
Of course, all of this only applies if you're sufficiently like them to be judged worthy of membership.
Well, of course. A group who accepts anyone and everyone loses its identity. The real problem is that people don't have freedom of movement: that is, the ability to seek out and join a group that they truly fit in with.