#mental healthcare
It’s important to find joy where you can in hard times. Today for me that looked like spending an hour browsing a used bookstore and buying these lovely finds. Take time for yourself, away from your phone. You deserve some peace.
Despite these wild times, I am still on track to publish my first book. It’s an incredible and difficult experience, writing about your own life, and remaining honest forces you to confront yourself on many levels.
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A few thoughts:
1) Issues with our society are a major cause of mental illness, things like social isolation, authoritarianism and intense competition for the resources we need to survive. Capitalism and the resulting need to work as hard as possible at all just to eat is a big issue, but I’m not sure it’s the best description of the whole problem. (Yes, some people use the term capitalism to describe all of what’s wrong, but I’d rather not.)
2) All mental illnesses are the result of multiple factors, from genetics to physical health to social experiences. All mental health diagnoses are social constructs, that is, not “real” the way chicken pox is. In some cases, diagnosis can be very helpful to the person and those close to them, by helping them understand how their mind works and find techniques to help it work better. In some cases, it’s really not helpful, especially when the label is used to stigmatize, exclude and deny people their rights, or to allow authority figures to deny their role in a person’s “problem” behaviors.
3) Even if our society was much healthier, mental illness would still exist. Trauma would still exist. Interpersonal trauma would still exist, although hopefully it would be less frequent and pervasive. And even if no one ever deliberately harmed another person, trauma would still exist! People have full-on PTSD, and lots of people have lesser trauma symptoms, from serious accidents or illnesses. And yes, people will continue to be born with brain differences like autism and ADHD, and with traits that predispose them to other conditions.
Improving society would reduce the need for mental health care, NOT eliminate it.
4) Sometimes medication helps, either because the conditions contributing to the mental illness can’t be removed, or because removing them doesn’t erase the harm. (For example, I’d be a lot less stressed if COVID suddenly ceased to exist, but my psychiatrist can’t do that.)
But medication MUST be the person’s choice, to the maximum possible extent, and it must be based on what’s right for them, not what’s convenient for caregivers.
