Sounds to me like the solution to the mental health crisis is not pills or therapy, but action
Some social scientists have a term, “reification,” for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.
For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.
Psychiatric sciences have long acknowledged the fact that stress is causally implicated in an enormous range of mental disorders, referring to the “stress-diathesis model” of mental illness. That model incorporates the well-documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop disorders from depression to schizophrenia.
The causal relationship may be even more direct. Remarkably, all throughout decades of research on mood disorders, scientists doing animal studies had to create animal models of anxiety and depression — that is, animals that showed behaviors that looked like human anxiety and depression — by subjecting them to weeks or months of chronic stress. Zap animals with unpredictable and painful shocks they can’t escape, force them to survive barely survivable conditions for long enough, put them in social situations where they are chronically brutalized by those higher up in the social hierarchy, and just like that, the animals will consistently start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html
"Barely survivable conditions for long enough"... like having to choose between utilities or groceries, like living paycheck to paycheck, experiencing the "FREEDOM" of medical bankruptcy, or being told to cower in fear because holding a former president accountable is "unprecedented"?
Maybe it's time to start giving the collective middle finger to things like these, throw medical bills in the garbage, tell debt collectors to take a long walk on a short pier, refuse to be held hostage by the people valuing guns over the lives of schoolkids, and stop being afraid of those who want us to be anxious and afraid all the time.
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