Sharing – Mental health is not an individual matter, but a political one

We’ve talked about this on the site before. I didn’t realize this kind of research has been showing us this since the 1950s:

The Stirling County Study and others like it demonstrated that mental illness was associated with poverty, inequality, social isolation and community disintegration (which involved factors such as crumbling civic infrastructure and a lack of groups that bind a community together). In interviews, the people from the Road and other such communities revealed how their lack of financial resources and low socioeconomic status left them feeling anxious, depressed and hopeless. Compared with more fortunate individuals, impoverished people were also more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis, and to be prescribed invasive treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, and even lobotomy, as opposed to psychotherapy.

https://psyche.co/ideas/mental-health-is-not-an-individual-matter-but-a-political-one

The researchers in the 50s and 60s failed to implement any policy changes to address their findings. Research then moved on to studying individual causes of mental illness, dealing with each patient individually, instead of addressing social impacts that hit a wider group. We’ve been repeating this failure ever since.

It’s not that we shouldn’t look at the individual cases; we should. But we have to address the systemic harm done to mental health by these issues. We have to stop pretending that economic issues don’t create mental health risks and ignore the real harm we do when we do nothing to lift people out of poverty or end racism and economic deprivation beyond calling anyone who wants to do those things a socialist.

It’s not working. It’s not solving the real problem.