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December 13 - December 17, 2023
Our current approach is a disaster on many fronts. Not only is mental health care delivered ineffectively, but it is mostly accessed during a crisis and strategically focused only on relieving symptoms and not on helping people recover.
Pg Xvii
Recovery is more than a reduction in symptoms: it is the return to a full and meaningful life. Or, as a very wise psychiatrist working on Los Angeles’s skid row told me, “Recovery? It’s the three Ps. It’s people, place, and purpose.”
Pg xix
Mental health also demands more than a medical solution. Healing includes a focus on equity, trust, and meeting people outside of traditional health care. This is not to downplay the need for medical solutions. Put simply, the mental health problem is medical, but the solutions are not just medical—they are social, environmental, and political. We not only need better access to medical treatments; we need to include people, place, and purpose as part of care.
Pg xx
At best, we have a mental sick-care system, designed to respond to a crisis but not developed with a vision of mental health that is focused on prevention and recovery.
Pg xxii
Ultimately, we can bend the curve on disability and death only if we understand that the mental health crisis is not just a crisis of care; it is a human rights issue. When people with
We have at best a sick-care system geared to crisis, not a health care system designed for recovery.
Pg 38
mental illness can affect anyone, and until we build a system with long-term support and a true social safety net that responds to the demands these illnesses make on individuals and their families, we will fail those who are in greatest need.
Pg 39
The gifted therapist Marsha Linehan, who was one of my advisors at NIMH, used to say that there is nothing worse that hospitalizing a suicidal patient. “When you commit a patient, you are saying they are hopeless. You are saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ A suicidal person does not need a locked unit. He needs a reason to live.”
Pg 155
