The Limitless Demand for Mental Health Services
I asked Bing Image Creator to create an image based on the words, “a world of no sad people.” It came up with this creepy illustration. Bing’s AI might know something we don’t know.
by James A. Bacon
Mental-health advocates in Virginia are making the case for more money for… what else? … mental health. An article by Radio IQ illuminates a disturbing example (I find it disturbing, not Radio IQ) of how the alleged need for mental- health services expands relentlessly to cover ever more of life’s travails.
Now activists are pushing the idea that people should be able to call upon mental-health professionals — often at public expense — for help in dealing with one of humankind’s most ancient and universal of emotions: grief.
Voices for Virginia’s Children, a nonprofit advocacy group, held a press conference earlier this week, in which CEO Rachael Dean acknowledged that Governor Glenn Youngkin’s $500 million “Right Help, Right Now” program implemented in 2022 “made some improvements in the mental health space,” as Radio IQ put it, but Virginia’s children need more help in schools.
The story was told of Marcus Lynch, a track star, father and husband who struggled with mental health issues after the death of his father. When Marcus was murdered in 2022, his wife Amanda turned to the care and support of their surviving children.
“Grief is an injury to the heart, mind, body and nervous system. And like any injury, it requires specialized care,” Lynch said. “Yet funding for these essential programs remains limited.”
Death and grief are human universals. Every culture in the history of mankind has developed means to deal with them: usually family, faith, and friends. No need for “specialized care.” Only in modern-day America does anyone see the need to professionalize, institutionalize, and fund with tax dollars the means to help people cope with inevitable life tragedies.
As far as I can tell the mental-health advocates get zero pushback in Virginia. How could anyone question public funds spent on people suffering from crippling anxiety, depression, or psychosis — among the most vulnerable members of society?
So, it falls to me as the official state curmudgeon to ask the questions that no one else dares ask (at least not out loud).
U.S. spending on mental health has increased voluminously in recent years — roughly 200% (far exceeding inflation of 54%) to about $240 billion between 2000 and 2024, according to Statista. So has the number of mental health professionals. In 2021, according to ClearImpact, there were approximately 284.3 mental health providers per 100,000 population in the U.S. The ratio increased to 324.9 per 100,000 by 2023 — in just two years! Yet mental health professionals say there is still huge unmet demand. The number of Americans suffering from some kind of mental health affliction continues to rise.
Has it occurred to anyone that the increasing recourse to mental health professionals — psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, counselors, marriage and family therapists and advanced practice nurses specializing in mental health — is part of the problem?
That’s the argument made by Abigail Shrier in her most recent book, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.” Shrier shares the conclusion of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that the explosion of cell phone use by adolescents has been a major contributor to anxiety and depression, but she argues that the rising rate of mental illness precedes, and is bigger than, the cell phone epidemic.
“Mental health” has become a massive industry. Its nostrums permeate popular culture and have transformed parenting. Shrier acknowledges that some types of counseling and mental-health therapy can be helpful, but most therapeutic approaches have serious side effects. Among her key findings (as summarized in her book blurb):
Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression;
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private;
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge.
Insofar as the mental-health industry is being infected by the woke ideology of intersectional oppression — this is me talking now, not Shrier — it can be massively counterproductive. For Whites, wokeness instills guilt. For minorities, it encourages people to blame Whites, structural racism, or implicit bias for all manner of problems. Insofar as woke psychology discourages honest introspection and the assumption of personal agency for control over one’s life, it makes people resentful and maladaptive to their surroundings.
Not all mental-health “experts” are woke. But many share a woke-like obsession with defining people as vulnerable, fragile and need of protection. The remedy for peoples’ anxieties, they say, is to shelter them from anything that might discomfit them — in other words, to shelter them from adversity.
That’s the exact wrong thing to teach about life! People should be encouraged to confront hardship and overcome it! That which does not kill me makes me stronger! To the extent that therapeutic thinking has taken over popular culture and parenting, it is directly responsible for creating the new generation of snowflakes.
The Youngkin administration’s response to the rising incidence of mental illness is to surrender to the mental health industry and provide more government funding. Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has proposed an extra $500 million in the next biennial budget for the expansion of school-based mental health services and addressing youth mental health challenges. (I shudder to contemplate how much General Assembly Democrats would like to pour into this endless pit.)
That’s a twofer for the erosion of society — another $500 million lifted from the pockets of taxpayers plus another $500 million to hire hundreds of mental health professionals, most of them schooled in woke and therapeutic ideologies, who will in all likelihood inspire more mental illness. As a bonus, as anxiety and depression spread like a plague, the mental-health industrial complex creates its own demand, and more unhappy people justifies coming back to ask for even more money!
As described by Radio IQ, these advocates are putting on the full-court press. Rachael Deane wants more money to “allow our school divisions to leverage Medicaid dollars.”
Deane says she’s found an ally in Behavioral Health Commission member Senator Creigh Deeds, whose son committed suicide in a tragic mental health episode.
“The reality is now we are in crisis,” Deeds said. “Coming out of the pandemic we’ve got a terrible crisis with young people we’ve got to address.”
Sure, while we’re spending billions on solutions with no proven efficacy, let’s throw more money onto the bonfire. Let’s cover grief counseling, too. The goals are infinitely inelastic. No person should ever feel psychological pain of any kind!
These hucksters of oxycodone for the soul will be the ruin of us!
