Crisis-Oriented Mental Heathcare is Not the Answer to America's Mental Heath Crisis

It sounds like the opening scenes of a certain wildly popular television drama: on Labor Day 2013 I found myself on a gurney in the ER of Beth Israel in Boston, a perfectly healthy 44-year-old victim of an epic panic attack, who would have a very expensive night of tests to determine if what I was feeling was real. I was released around noon the next day with a clean bill of health, and a delicate suggestion: I might want to find myself a therapist. There is so much about basic preventative care that's broken in our health care system, mental health is hardly even on the radar. Therapy, while no longer exactly stigmatized, as long as it's in the pop-culture context of self-help or increased productivity, is still very much an add-on. We have no real concept of ongoing mental health that's built into our bare-bones idea of preventative health. Add to this our zero-sum culture's bizarre and harmful view that any stumble in career or personal life is a FAIL worthy of censure and scorn, and it's clear we've built a public culture that fuels a need for ongoing mental health care while simultaneously discouraging those who seek it out. I had struggled with periods of situational depression for decades, and had negotiated them clumsily by literally moving away from anything that brought them on. I had moved from the Midwest to the West Coast to the East Coast, to Europe for a long stint, back to the Midwest and then the East Coast again, but it was as they say: wherever you go, th...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news