Insights from While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence.

Over on the Next Big Idea site, they have a long read from Meg Kissinger about her new book. She shares five key insights from her book, starting with number 1:

1. The mental health system is not a system.

It’s a sieve that allows millions of sick people to fall through its many holes. The definition of a system is “a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism.” When it comes to mental health, almost nothing works together. If you’ve ever tried to get help for yourself or someone you love, you know this.

As I read the rest of her insights, I realized this is where it all starts. We don’t have a mental health care system. If we had some semblance of a system the other four insights would go without saying. We’d see mental health patients as human beings, we would listen to them about their lived experiences, we’d have support systems for families, and we’d understand that despite all the effort and love put in, some people would still lose the battle, just like we do with cancer and every other illness.

What we have instead, with our lack of a system, is the opposite of all of this. We stigmatize mental health patients, assume we don’t have to listen to them and blame them and their families when they don’t make it.

That’s not a recipe for success, and what we commonly have when it comes to mental health care is not success.

Read more at the link above and let us know what you think.