The Next Pandemic: Mental Illness

[Matt Beasley]

The Next Pandemic: Mental Illness
By Daniel Henninger, May 18, 2022, WSJ

A longtime term for what the United States often did
with the mentally ill is “warehousing.” Out of sight
and out of mind. That's ending. They are everywhere—-
on the streets, in our homes, our schools and prisons.
Emerging from the pandemic, America is overflowing with
people suffering from a broad range of mental disturbance.
Mental illness is the U.S.’s next pandemic.

At one extreme, Buffalo mass-murder suspect Payton Gendron
is another case study in how the U.S. looks past this problem.
As with Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland, Fla., mass murderer, it's
being widely reported that Gendron was admitted to a hospital
last year for mental evaluation, that “signals were missed,”
etc. At Virginia Tech 15 years ago, “signals were missed” for
a disturbed 23-year-old shooter who killed 32 people.

Signals aren’t missed. They are ignored, because there's
no pragmatic understanding of what to do with the signals
of mental illness. Instead, we divert into a largely
irrelevant search for “motive.”

Note how official commentary about the Buffalo shooting is
overwhelmingly political, with Biden & NY Gov. Kathy Hochul
describing the attacks primarily as racism, and the media
obsessing over “replacement theory.” Defaulting to recrimination
puts us in our current political comfort zone, while the reality
of Payton Gendron’s mental disturbance will fade—until next time.

This column’s subject is not the psychotic young males whose
outlet is killing. It is the emerging post-Covid reality that
a slowly building crisis of poorly treated mental illness,
anxiety, depression and suicide is cresting just as the pandemic
ends. Suicide, already the second leading cause of death among
people 15 to 34 before the pandemic, has increased.

In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics and others warned
of “soaring rates of mental health challenges” among the young,
and a similar warning followed from the U.S. surgeon general.
Ask whoever is sitting next to you for anecdotal evidence.
It’s omnipresent. Virtually any mental-health practitioner,
especially at universities, admits to being overwhelmed with
patients.

It’s well known that many people spent the pandemic drinking
too much alcohol or using drugs. One result: The C.D.C. just
reported a record number of deaths from drug overdoses last year,
nearly 108,000 & 15% higher than 2020, prominently from fentanyl.
The Wall Street Journal this week described how more young adults
with drug-addiction or mental problems are moving in with their
parents. Tender loving care never hurts but often isn’t enough.

The mentally ill homeless are piling up on the streets of
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Austin and on and on.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been dismantling homeless
tent camps, but he’s shoveling sand into the ocean. They have
nowhere to go. Absent medical treatment, some of the most
severely ill self-medicate on the street with alcohol or drugs,
turn violent & typically end up in holding pens like New York’s
Rikers Island jail complex or Chicago’s Cook County jail.

With the societywide surge of mental disorder during the
pandemic, the U.S. has arrived at a moment of reckoning for a
policy failure that has run like an open hydrant since the
deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s emptied the mental
hospitals. The solution was supposed to be outpatient “community
care.” It never happened.

Andrew Scull, author of a just-published book on psychiatry’s
struggle to address mental illness (“Desperate Remedies,”
recently reviewed in these pages), wrote a devastating critique
last year of how politics & medicine have failed the mentally ill.
“Community care,” he wrote, “was a shell game with no pea. In
place of forcible confinement in publicly run asylums, the
chronically mentally ill have been abandoned to their fate.”

With the incidence of disorders and suicides rising, there'll be
postmortems on the damage done during the pandemic to young people.
With their schools closed, some isolated from friends &
disintegrated inside social-media sites like TikTok or the
online cauldrons that seem to have consumed Payton Gendron.
All true. But some matters need settling.

While there’s a good chance of another big virus outbreak in
our lifetimes, there can never be another Anthony Fauci. Past
some point, less than a year, it was clear the lockdowns and
closings were wrecking mental health, especially among children.
In fact, we do have a National Institute of Mental Health, but
that constituency had no seat at the decision table. Political
officials ceded complete control of pandemic policy to public-
health authorities. Never again. Next time, private and personal
health should get a voice.

The politics, science & economics of mental health are difficult.
If you want to do X—say, compel treatment for psychosis—an
organized resistance will try to stop you. And it’s expensive.
So the politicians give up and invoke guns, racism and the rest.
Mental disorder has become too pervasive to sweep under a rug
as big as the entire United States. The solution has been to let
mom and dad alone pick up the pieces. It’s not enough.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-pandemic-mental-illness-homelessness-buffalo-shooting-online-hospital-11652906894

[Matt Beasley]

Matt Beasley wrote:
> The Next Pandemic: Mental Illness
> By Daniel Henninger, May 18, 2022, WSJ

> [ . . . ]
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-pandemic-mental-illness-homelessness-buffalo-shooting-online-hospital-11652906894
---------------------
In uk.d-i-y, Animal wrote:
A lot could be said about this. But 3 points stand out.
Rates of mental illness correlate with levels of government control
around the globe. Since 2020 the world has seen a strong lurch
toward dishonesty, control and more in government. Rising mental
health problems are a predictable result.

Second, no solution is happening largely because those in
charge in politics & mental health professionals have little to no
understanding of the causes, the conditions or how to improve
mental health. In a lot of cases the reality has degenerated to
nothing more than abuse for pay. It's so bad that zero care in the
community is in most cases better. Nothing can change until basic
honesty happens. Politicians & practitioners have no intention of
admitting failure, and the general public are mostly childlike enough
to assume the government must be right. We're not about to see honesty.

Third, you can't get rid of homeless people. No amount of moving
them on will rid them. This should be obvious. You can fight with
them endlessly or you can decide to let them pitch a tent in a park
or wherever. The latter is the sensible option, but even that level of
basic practical sense isn't happening.

In summary, it's getting worse due to its complete mismanagement,
and will continue to do so.
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