Fun fact: mental health issues are less prevalent when you’re able to afford a healthy diet, roof over your head, occasional social activities, and aren’t constantly stressed about all the bills you have to pay.

Here’s my solution:

• Currently the US spends roughly $11,912 per capita on healthcare. New Zealand, a comparably developed country, spends $4,393 per capita but their system apparently provides better care.
• the US follows New Zealand’s example and properly regulates the pharma, insurance and healthcare system, bringing down costs by $7519.
• the US now has better (mental-)healthcare
• Everyone gets a Universal Basic Income of $626.58(=$7519/12) per month to help pay the most important bills or help pay the rent

Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering.

I actually think this is true for everybody diagnosed with a “mental illness”. Society wants to push you to a psychiatrist as an easy fix. But in reality, there are social and emotional pressures that have caused the patient to become distressed. It could be bullying, or financial worries, or the loss of a relative, or other big worries. Psychiatry invents “diagnoses” so that the true social and environmental pressures get swept under the rug. Because they don’t care about you, they just believe that you might turn dangerous (even if you have no history of doing anything wrong), so they’ll drug you to reduce what they think is a risk.

Edit: Thinking about it more, maybe we should get rid of the biopsychosocial model that doctors love to talk about. Just have a psychosocial model instead (getting rid of the bio bit, where they drug the patient). Because nearly all of the time, they never prove any biological fault with the patient’s brain. And yet they’re still happy to drug the patient.

Ending the drug war would help psychiatrisy move forward with some excellent meds (psilocybin, MDMA). It would also let a lot of innocent people avoid the six year prison stint I did for growing my own medication.

So, I don’t see it as not political. But I also don’t see it as not psychiatric.

So our mental health crisis ain’t gettin’ solved, then.