Our culture if toxic masculinity that equates mental illness with weakness and personal moral failure
It’s truly disgusting.
On the micro scale these aren't mean or bad people. A lot of people I know back home (Missouri, middle class, many of them baby boomers) follow this brand of logic and the accompanied tough-guy/cult-of-the-dollar ethos.
Not one of them applies this ruthless logic in their daily life. They are compassionate with the people in their lives, some to the point of enabling people with substance abuse problems as opposed to letting the authorities 'deal' with them.
The complexity and scale of these problems out-strips the empathy required to solve them for many people. The experiences(no health care, mental health issues, prejudice) do not match their own experiences which makes those dealing with them the 'other'.
The way to getting some traction with these problems probably lies more in bridging the empathy gap than in the solution space.
If things keep going the way they are, those experiences will only become more relatable; not less.
I have a good, high-paying job with good benefits and even I am considering going without health insurance because I get so little from the premiums I pay. Most of my providers are out of network because all of the ones in network have 3-12 month waiting lists for new patients.
And that’s on top of the $5000 deductible — plus the fact I know if anything serious happens I’d likely have to fight with the insurance company for years and have to take out a loan to cover the treatment in the meantime (I’ve had to do this before, and conversations with others in my situation taught me I was far from alone).
Our health insurance system is officially non-functional in my eyes.
Trump made that harder for lower and middle class workers with his “tax cut”, but it’s still viable in certain tax brackets. But something tells me that ending risk-pooling in favor of individual tax deductions is the endgame the current GOP has in mind...
Those who feed toxic beliefs/prey on folks' insecurities for personal gain, range from misguided/unscrupulous to bad.