Author: Eric Reinhart, public health
Published on: 08/08/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
Despite spending more on psychiatric services, mental health in the United States has only been getting worse. Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, overdose, chronic disability due to mental health conditions, and loneliness have all been rapidly increasing. Despite this, the US medical establishment has persistently refused to use its substantial political power to demand the transformation of care by expanding non-medical support systems. Trump’s order defunds housing-first programmes and harm-reduction services. It also defunding homelessness and encampments, but contains no provisions to protect people from abuse or misuse of psychiatric labels. It also threatens groups upon which the administration has shown a eugenicist fixation. Trump and Kennedy’s lies about mental health, cuts to public care and vision for expanding the incarceration of immigrants, homeless people, and anyone they label as mentally ill, worsen mental health while creating more opportunities to profit from preventable suffering, disability and death. In a precedent that likely informs Trump’s plan, Brazil’s former president attacked psychiatric reformsas leftist indoctrination and defunded community mental health services. Bolsonaro’s reversal of Brazil’s internationally recognised psychiatric reform movement inflicted profound harm. Under his rule, institutionalisation in coercive “therapeutic communities” skyrocketed. Investigations revealed widespread abuses in these communities, including forced confinement, unpaid labour, religious indoctrination, denial of medication, and physical and psychological violence. Critics of psychiatry on the left demand rights to non-medical care, economic security and democratic participation. If the left does not harness this anger towards constructive change, the right will continue to exploit it. The solution is not to shield America’s mental health systems from critique. The fight over mental health policy is a fight over the meaning of society and the survival of democratic ideals. Will we respond to suffering with solidarity, or with abandonment and punishment? Will we recognise collective causes of distress and invest in systems of care, or allow political opportunists to exploit public disillusionment for authoritarian ends?
Original: 1487 words
Summary: 314 words
Percent reduction: 78.88%
Looks like my future if the fascists win