Book Community: DO BETTER with Mental Health Advocacy

All of Mental Health Month came and went.

I saw nobody talk about the rampant conflicts of interest in the mental health field or how the pharma companies influence everything from the creation of the DSM to the marketing of symptom pools and diagnoses directly to doctors.

I saw nobody talk about the homeless, who are disproportionately affected by mental health. I saw nobody talk about police involvement in crisis intervention. I saw not one mention of any psychotic illnesses like anything in the schizo cluster.

The best y’all could do was some bougie, privileged mental health awareness: mental health for middle class white ladies with manageable mental illnesses like anxiety. Where is anybody talking about the most vulnerable psych patients? The patients who are in-patient on a revolving door? The homeless people who don’t have their basic needs met who spend just as much time in the criminal justice system as they do in mental hospitals.

You all only like mental health awareness 1) when it’s cute and manageable and about people who look like YOU and 2) when it worships at the altar of therapy (aka you’ve been brainwashed by the insidious influence of big pharma)

If you are not advocating for reform in the mental health field to end conflicts of interest from pharmaceutical companies, then you are not an ally. I’d rather you say absolutely nothing than use the mentally ill to virtue signal when you actually don’t care. And stop telling people to go to therapy! Y’all are pushing people into a system that is likely to harm and otherize them.

Full rant here: