Mental Health in Our Society
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A bit of a pretext I feel is necessary for this post. This post WILL offend some people, this I am sure of. Additionally most posts are written in more of a third person perspective, this one will be from my perspective as this post doesn’t reflect the views of every writer here at Coffee Break Liberty. This post isn’t a slam on those that suffer from mental health issues or those on the care side of the equation but rather a place to raise questions that might not have answers yet or ever.
We all understand that when we pay for something that we expect a certain level of service. If you were to pay for a meal for example from a restaurant and it wasn’t to your satisfaction you probably wouldn’t continue to go back, pay more for worse tasting food for 30 years. Sadly that seems to be what we are doing in the mental health care industry. In 1988 the United States as a whole spent over $37 billion on mental health, now in 2018 we are expected to spend more than $213 billion. This increase in expenditure should be alarming for anything even if the stats showed us that it was successful. Again I don’t want people to think I’m saying that mental health expenditure is a waste, it’s not. We need to be asking though if the money spent is having anything close to the desired impact. When I see that suicide rates are up, addiction levels are up and mass shootings seem to be on the rise I start to wonder if all this talk about people needing more access to mental health is really gonna have the desired impact. More people now have more access to mental health care than ever before and yet we see these trends on the rise, and keep in mind these aren’t just spikes but a rising trend over years now. Maybe it is just me but it was my understanding that access to mental health care and the actual care would bring these numbers down. I do understand too that mental health covers far more than just these three stats I pointed out, trust me I get that. I landed on these three examples though because they’re the extremes if you will and are on the rise. I want to say again, I feel I will say this a bit here, that I am not trying to bash those in the mental health care field. I am concerned though that the industry has issues on it’s hands and those issues just aren’t being addressed properly.
There are issues I believe with how mental health is treated with loads of pharmaceuticals in this day and age. We have to acknowledge that when a person is prescribed some kinda of anti depression anti this pro that drug we are relying on the drug to re-engineer what a person’s body is doing. I personally am far more a fan of one on one and group type therapy work in the field. The remission rates with placebos and antidepressants when combined with therapy are nearly the same, within one percentage point in some studies. These two different methods of treatment have huge differences in cost. Yet still antidepressants are giving out for many things that don’t involve depression at all! 80% of the antidepressants that are prescribed are done so by medical professionals other than psychiatrists, 80% of 254 million prescriptions a year. Keep in mind that these drugs are also prescribed for things like chronic pain and low energy, two things these drugs were not designed to treat. (What could go wrong with administering antidepressants for other uses? he asked sarcastically) So in the look at cost vs outcome we have a huge example right here, over prescribed drugs with little to now difference in the efficacy rates.
I’m not sure this is even a mental health issue more than it is an issue with have with society today, and that is what truly concerns me most of all. Are the three examples I pointed to just now an outcome of the society we live in? Can the increasing rates be curbed, slowed or even reversed with mental health care. The pressure cooker that we seem to be in is getting hotter and we have seen already those on the far ends start to crack. Can this course be reversed? This started off as a question about the efficacy of mental health care vs the costs and yet I made my way AGAIN to the issues we have with our society today. I’m not sure what is causing them exactly but it is becoming more and more clear to see what is increasing the pressure. There have always been people that will resort to violence before other methods, history is full of them, now though it seems that there are more people today that fall into this category if you will. We as a society have issues that drugs and money won’t solve. Again, because I want to be clear, I’m not trying to attack anyone and I’m not saying that if you take antidepressants or work in the mental health care field that what you are doing is wrong, I’m trying to say that the issues with society are much larger than that and require a group effort by us all, one that isn’t directed by the government mind you but one that we can pick individually and it starts with community.
This post didn’t go the way I intended but that’s ok, took me a few times to really get things on paper and I’m ok with that too. As I was writing this I hit the back space often to delete entire paragraphs. For those looking for the liberty in this I tried to work it in towards the end but I do believe it to be true. Community, be it family, friends, neighbors are great ways to start working on our issues in society at the core. We are 310 million individuals trying to make this all work somehow, we got this.
Thank you for reading and please don’t forget to like and share! Also don’t forget to get a Coffee Break Liberty mug from our store!
Keep that coffee warm for us.
LWS
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252393/total-us-expenditure-for-mental-health-services/
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187465/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-since-1950/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5007565/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-by-gender-since-1950/
