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americans have decided human beings are not important. thats it, full stop.
we dont provide healthcare for our people. we provide healthcare for our wealthy people.
so the question of 'why doesnt america do something about its mental health issues' is kinda silly in that, we have decided collectively that humans do not matter. only profits.
when a mentally deficient person kills a room full of kindergartners and literally nothing happens, you have your answer.
Because the U.S. has been letting its mental health issues fester under a veneer of American Exceptionalism for the better part of a century in order to squeeze every last drop of labor surplus out of its citizens.
More proximally, because our mental health offerings are unreliable and sometimes out of touch.
Maybe because it's a totally unserved population. Even if you can afford mental health care, which many/most can't, it's very difficult to find a doc. There's a shortage and an inability to pay.
https://ct.counseling.org/2023/05/a-closer-look-at-the-mental-health-provider-shortage/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-behavioral-health-care-affordability-problem/
The article mentions neither of these issues. Perhaps his irresponsible for not doing so.
The article explicitly talks about that multiple times, though. Were you reading one of the articles that this one references? It mentions repeatedly how inaccessible and unaffordable healthcare is, using both of those points, and then moves on to discuss the issue as part of a broader societal trend.
Apologies.
Huh. Guess I need to skim my pooping material better.
Not OP, but I appreciate your honesty.
I mean, everybody's fallible. No need to be a dick about it right?
Oftentimes if an article is two long for me to read while I'm desecrating the smallest room in the house, I'll have GPT summarize it for me. I think that's what I did in this case but honestly I don't even remember. Like most people I am bathed in information and like most people a lot of it just rolls right off.
The first few paragraphs of the blog post explained the problem pretty well - lack of access to professional mental health care.
The other parts of the article...especially bringing in techno optimism, feels unnecessary.
Do we see young people using tiktok to self diagonise other kinds of medical issues? At least not at the scale of mental health. And that is likely because they have much better access to professional help.
As society, we really really need to put more resources into mental health. It was an overlooked issue for centuries.
Tiktok doesn't cost thousands of dollars?
Besides all the reasons other commenters have said, it's because mental health is a pseudo-social phenomenon among teens.
Having a mental illness gets them attention, online and in person. I have two teens, and even though both have diagnosed mental illness due to trauma from their other parent, they still seek, discuss, and revel in self-diagnoses.
If a friend claims to have something, they rush to the internet to do "research," and begin exhibiting "symptoms." Same thing is true with other labels.
We have a dearth of parenting, due to needing two incomes to make a household run. Adult attention is scarce, so teens make up for it with wild claims and garnering attention from other teens. The internet makes it easy to model behaviors. So yes, there is an increase in mental illness, but not the kinds, nor for the reasons the internet would have us believe.
Doctors are expensive in most parts of the world and don't care in the rest
Mhmm. I think especially America needs to step up their game when it comes to health care.
And lots of the other (western?) countries, too, regarding how they treat young people and in which way they want to covey moral values and provide them with a perspecive on life.
munchausen by tiktok
I can't wait until we have some cheap brain scanner where people can just put it on and it tells you exactly what's up. No doctor bias or anything.
I believe autism was linked to gut bacteria a few years ago. Let me check: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9355470/
Only read the abstract, but this paper seems to rather link the onset of autism to the gut microbiome. Very interesting though! Scanning the brain or your DNA would still work I guess. If a person has autism, they could theoretically show neurological differences. But maybe the variance of brains is just to large to ever be able to tell...