90% of US adults say the United States is experiencing a mental health crisis
lite.cnn.com
lite.cnn.com
Those are all justifiable things to be more depressed about now than people were in the past. People are smarter, wealthier, and more educated now than they were in the past, and that causes them to think further into the future (which is depressing).
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...
I also don’t think most people anticipate the political instability that will result from hundreds of millions of people needing to move.
Even 10 years ago everything seemed to be "normal" in the sense that it's same old stuff, nothing too major. There's always going to be the political disagreements and all that. But things have shifted like crazy.
And I don't think it's just because of technology that we are able to read what more people are thinking right away and have more instant access to news. Although, it kind of is simply because we are able to see how insane more and more people are.. but it's more than that.
There has been a massive shift and divide in many countries and it's literally to the point that it impacts people on a daily basis. Seeing how so many people care so little about others has never been more apparent.
You had the US president trolling people every day on twitter for 4 years straight. And then seeing just how much of the population is OK with the utter insanity. Don't tell me that doesn't take a toll on people even if you try as much as you can to avoid it.
There is very little hope of any of this being fixed any time soon. You'd pretty much have to be crazy to not be having a mental health crisis right now.
If you go back to the 1930s and 1940s, now you're talking 25-50% unemployment globally, countries losing half their breeding age males to war, entire cities being wiped out in seconds due to nuclear explosions and not just the specter of them. Existentialism and post-modernism came out of that shit. We got Kafka and Sartre, things were so depressing.
Go back further and then what? Slavery? Post-industrial black lung? 8 year-olds working 100 hour weeks in factories?
When were things better than they are now other than some tiny blip of early 21st century techno-optimism?
As far as mental health is concerned, I guarantee you every male in my family that I ever knew going back to at least the 1920s suffered from severe undiagnosed depression. They all drank like crazy, beat the hell out of their kids, never smiled. The trauma they experienced was insane. My grandfather was ship-wrecked in the South Pacific by a kamikaze pilot and survived on driftwood for 6 weeks by drinking fish blood. I don't even want to imagine what those kinds of lives were like. Did it make it better that they didn't realize they were depressed and just thought that was what it meant to be a man?
Right, but if I'm sane, and I'm surrounded by crazies with megaphones, that might not be good for my mental health...
Increased funding for mental health services seems like a poor solution.
With crime, you can look at some Bellwether metrics like murder and try to understand the trends from there. Murders have indeed gone down over time.
When it comes to Mental Health, you can also look at bellwether stats. In the United States, there is certainly a dramatic increase in suicide deaths. I would argue that suicides are a fairly objective metric unlike diagnosis. Suicides have gone up significantly for most populations. Someone could quibble that drug overdoses could fall into the suicide category and contribute to this, but I would counter that even drug overdoses deaths are themselves supportive of a mental health problem.
When you see something like a 50% increase in suicides for 15 to 24 year old within a decade, I think it should ring some alarm bells and spur discussion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
I recently read a NYT opinion piece that very eloquently laid out this idea: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-...
Btw one favorite quote from that NYT article:
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.
Was that Reagan's campaign line, to rationalize the money grab?
Can anyone fill in the history here?
The idea (rightly so imho) was to destigmatize mental health, and to move to a model of reintegration, and not route people into institutionalization where they couldn't get out.
This model declined during the 80s, and to a lesser extent 90s, for many many reasons. One is defunding, so you ended up in a situation where the institutions closed, but then as part of general government defunding (ala Reagan and post-Reagan trends), the community mental health services closed.
Another issue that's probably less apparent is the neo-Kraepelinian movement in psychiatry that started in the 70s and accelerated during the 80s kind of was at odds with with the community services model. It allowed for treatments (think antipsychotics) that allowed people to leave institutions, but I think boxed in thinking about psychiatric care during subsequent decades. "Psychopathology as a medical illness" when it works in extreme cases is good at getting people out of residential institutions, but then is bound to a hospital-patient model that the US isn't very good at getting out of.
So at the same time psychiatry was succeeding at getting people out of institutions through a biomedical model of psychiatry, it was kind of failing by neglecting the sociocultural side of psychiatry. So people get out of institutions because of effective medications, but then when they're out there, they're tied to hospitals for care and not community centers as they were originally envisioned.
Basically, community-based care works, but requires a certain amount of infrastructure like anything, and it's been neglected to some extent because of biases in the healthcare system. It's also difficult once you recognize that psychiatric difficulties are bound up in very big socioeconomic structural issues that require a lot of political will to change, and if you don't, it incentivizes a head-in-the-sand kind of reaction.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a return to interest in these kinds of decentralized care models for various reasons in the coming decades, but it's hard to say.
I think it's unfair to tie community mental health service trends to Reagan in particular, but I do think to the extent you attribute certain trends in public and government service funding to Reagan, it's accurate to say that Reagan-era trends were one contributor to problems.
Didn't think though the consequences however.
They did, but it was doublespeak. "Community health services" took the form of privatized prisons.
I feel like crisis is fair here. The 90% figure is quite shocking of a number until you realize it's CNN.
It's not news though. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e2.htm
Everyone knew lockdowns would cause this situation. The big question is how to deal with it. If you were emperor of your country, ordering or making mental health support free may be a long term excellent choice but there isn't the ability to handle it. There are not enough professionals to handle the demand.
Even prior to covid, we had mental health awareness campaigns with significant consequences in convincing people they have mental health issues when they in reality did not. So the already scarce resource was already stretched beyond the limit.
So we have reached a crisis point where people aren't able to get the help they need: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847360/
Lockdowns didn't help, but they were just a small part of a very large collection of stressors covid brought the world which itself was just a small part of a larger ongoing breakdown of systems people have come to depend on for generations. Even if covid hadn't happened we'd be facing a mental health crisis right now.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
90% of US adults say they are experiencing a mental health crisis? no!
90% of US adult say that the country is experiencing a mental health crisis.
Why not ask experts instead???
When did the gut feelings of individuals about such matters become a stand-in for news reporting?
I know journalists are also susceptible to writing about domains they don’t truly understand, but this kind of reporting is skipping right past the step of trying to engage with experts and proceeding to poll unqualified individuals about their gut feeling.
Because this is a story about public perception. While you may find it alarmist, a plain reading suggests that the people surveyed are alarmed.
They might not be correct, but the fact that so many see it in the same way suggests to me that there is probably something worth examining more deeply.
From what I've seen, paid-for apps/SaaS is basically the only way to go. Unless you depend on donations, which seems like wishful thinking.
There's B2B as well, but I think people without work need help the most.
By not taking VC money such that they exist to pay back their initial investors.
How can the United States continue to pay more per capita for healthcare than any other nation in the world?
hmmmmmm... maybe healthcare has direct consequences on our economic health.
Web pages and books are probably better, even that's not 100% privacy safe, not much is.
Sure there are elements of our society that are adding stresses we did not have before. I'm not against that.
The main concern I have is this becoming a fad and people become less resilient as a result.
- Les Visible (paraphrased)
"SCARY SOUNDING GOV'T AGENCY declined to comment on X"
I heard this and read all the video comments (all 1000+). Not a single mention of the language.
There is a serious problem here and it needs some rather forceful correction.
People broadly speaking, need connection and meaning in their lives, and the capitalist systems most of us are slaves to does not even come close to providing it. Heck it actively seeks to avoid providing those things, as if people had them they might not need / want to work so damn much.
When your choices are spend 60+ hours a week working at one or more jobs where you could be laid off at a moments notice to protect the "Profits" of the already wealthy, or you know just fucking starve, it's no wonder so many people are stressed and depressed.
The world these days for a heck of a lot of people is like an automatic hamster wheel that keeps spinning faster and faster, and if you can't keep up you die. Sounds like a surefire recipe for a "Mental health crisis" to me...
Imagine how much happier they would be if they spent this time building and maintaining relationships with other human beings.
If you look at the numbers for how many hours a week people work, they haven't really changed much over time. I think the big change is how people are spending their free time