The year 2020 has been very difficult for mental health. The pandemic, isolation and economic downturn has greatly increased depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. When we talk about real health care reform, we mean a major expansion of mental health services.

Be careful with that one Senator. Big Pharma would love to take it over for you. The best mental health services are #Medicare4All, #CancelStudentDebt & easier access to education. Treat people’s despair by taking away their hopelessness; that’s the best mental health care of all

Yes, but lets not forget those with serious mental illness, e.g. psychotic disorders, require more intensive, specialist support also, not just an alleviation in their despair. We trivialise serious mental illness when we conflate it with deapair or lack of meaning.

I agree with you although I don’t think it trivializes those disorders to point out the other issue. Both are very true and both are very real. Big Pharma has a beneficial place in treating the former, but has staked out a very illegitimate profit center overtreating the latter.

I agree. Existential concerns, like despair and meaning, by definition affect all people. I only worry that blurring mental distress with mental illness can impoverish public understanding of psychosis, mania, and other significant situations in acute psychiatry.

What happens, paradoxically, is we become adept at being aware of the necessary lifestyle changes and interventions for low-level distress (go for a walk, breathe etc), and at the same time intense and debilitating illness is less present in public conciousness.

Why that happens im not sure. I hope to raise awareness of severe illness. I suspect there may be an inherent, human aversion to confronting the very severely mentally unwell, who may remind us of our own fragility. This interferes with empathy. Society must reckon with this.