RE: My Thoughts on Mental Health In America
I think that opening up, and talking to people certainly helps, but there's a larger issue in our society that isn't being addressed. There's an awful lot of people who need psychological help, but aren't getting it. Either because the therapy is too expensive, or their medication is too expensive. We have to figure out some way to getting people access to the help that they need. If people have to choose between putting food on the table, and paying for medication, food, clothing, and shelter will come first.
Also, I think a lot of people are just too busy with their lives to take much notice of people who need psychological help. I'm always shocked when I find on the news that someone has gone on a murderous rampage, and then it turns out that 20 people knew that the person was having issues, and told no one about it until after the fact. People need to stop being so self absorbed, and take some notice about what's going on around them. Opening up is a great idea, but the problem is that a lot of the time there's no one around who wants to listen.
You make a very solid point: Mental Healthcare is not available to many who would benefit from it. Certainly there are many homeless people in this country who need support and a person to share with who do not get either because they can't afford professional help and people in general avoid the homeless. Homeless people have lost much of who they are in both material things and in their basic humanity.
It doesn't cost anything to listen to another human being share with you except your time. For some people just having somebody listen can help immensely.
I definitely agree with you that listening to people can really help them in a lot of situations. However, when you say that "It doesn't cost anything to listen to another human being share with you except your time.", doesn't that kind of overlook the point that the most valuable thing we have today is our time? When you pay someone to do something, what you're really paying them for is their time. When you give someone your time, in some sense you're giving them something just as valuable as money, maybe even more. I don't know. Perhaps I'm not looking at it in the right way, but it does seem to me that the thing that people lack most these days is time. Some people say that one can make time for things that are important enough, but that's not always easy to do. It's sad that we often don't have enough time for the people in our lives, but that's often the case.