The US is a cruel society in many ways, but one of the worst is that we refuse mental health care to so many individuals who desperately need it.
#Compassion
there are a lot of places where an emergency room psychiatrist will prescribe chemical straight jackets to people who arrive in the middle of a crisis and say the right (or is it wrong?) words about possibly being a threat to self and/or others.
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non-emergency mental health care is just as troubled. we don't even have a notion of what counts as mental health. the DSM is a manual full of _disorders_ without an explicit statement of what _ordered_ minds are supposed to be. moving target anyway.
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we also can't figure out where the boundaries are between mental health and spiritual health, if such boundaries even exist at all. big gray area. i'm certainly not qualified to draw a bright line in it. probably nobody is.
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the stigmatization of mental health issues continues to be a problem. a consequence of defining mental health diagnosis and treatment as being a collection of disorders and syndromes. to even admit that you are suffering and need help is to implicitly admit that you're broken.
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"broken" in this society means that you have difficulty functioning in the ways that our society rewards. the cruelest part of American society is how bad it is at putting up with people who don't naturally feel comfortable in the mainstream socially accepted paths.
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mental health care, such as it is, often means getting a person to be more functional in terms of mainstream socially promoted life choices. this isn't terrible, actually, but it is limiting. where does healing of the mind and spirit begin? probably not there, in my opinion.
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I do wonder what a truly compassionate and humane society would do with people experiencing mental states that cause suffering. I'm a bit disappointed in my own inability to imagine a better world in this respect.
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Minimally, it wouldn't leave them insane and screaming in the streets with no health care to be abused, preyed upon, and potentially violently assaulted.
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that's what it wouldn't do. what _would_ it do with/for those people?
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