May 14, 2025 - Epoch Times
02:48
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Another one of the criticisms I've seen come up is that your story or your book or this approach will be used to actually cut back mental health services and offerings of help which are available to people at large. | |
| How do you respond to that? | |
| That's a big question. | |
| And what are the true causes here of this so-called mental health crisis that we're in? | |
| If it's not Chemical imbalances in our brains or faulty brain pathology, which it isn't. | |
| There's no evidence base for any of that to this day. | |
| The NIMH acknowledges that. | |
| It's not too hard to kind of come to the conclusion that it's about our relationship to the world we live in. | |
| Of course, people need support and resources, but do we need them in the arena of getting people more treatment, more diagnoses? | |
| Or do we need them actually where people's struggles emerge from, the circumstances of their lives? | |
| And I would argue that's where funding needs to be directed, to the community level, to neighborhoods, to helping people get their basic needs met. | |
| So I have yet to see my story actually be used by any policymaker as a justification. | |
| I don't take that critique too seriously, but I do think the deeper fears behind that critique are valid. | |
| I share them. | |
| I just don't think the solution is to fund more mental health treatment. | |
| I think it's to actually redirect funding to the circumstances of people's lives, which is what leads them to have the struggles that get them diagnosed and medicated in the first place. | |
| And one quick additional point to that is... | |
| As I found for myself, long-term mental health treatment was actually quite disabling for me in mind, body, and spirit. | |
| And I do think we have a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis. | |
| And for anyone not familiar with the term, iatrogenesis is basically harm caused by treatment, by doctors. | |
| I'm not saying they're doing this on purpose. | |
| I think these are well-meaning people who want to help. | |
| But the mental health industry can have this paradoxical effect where it promotes itself as being this resource that will help people feel happier, feel more productive, feel more connected, capable, and yet ends up producing the very opposite in people. | |
| And so I think we need to address that as well. |
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