by Dr. Joseph Mercola, public domain
(Apr. 21, 2022) — The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals. Christin Drake, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, writes:1
“Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her. These are not the worried well. They are people in crisis.
Their conditions are complex and acute, and require the expertise of a psychiatrist who can talk with them, assess possible medical causes for their problems, manage withdrawal,
prescribe medications when needed, and connect with other providers … Before the pandemic, I could almost always help. I would be able to find time to meet someone for a consultation, or make a few calls to secure the right referral.
But now, my every available hour — even those that jut into my ability to meet my obligations to my family — is full. My colleagues tell me the same. They are starting work earlier, working later, contending with long waitlists and their own limits. All the while, patients in crisis are going without psychiatric help.”
Depression and Anxiety Are at All-Time Highs
According to the most recent Household Pulse Survey,2 conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 27.3% of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety, and that’s in addition to the 40 million Americans who report substance use disorders3 and the 14 million who have more serious mental illnesses.4
“There are about 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S.5 By my back-of-the-napkin math, if all of us were treating only people with depression or anxiety, each of us would have to see more than 3,000 patients a year,” Drake notes.6
In short, there aren’t enough practicing psychiatrists to handle the burgeoning tsunami of mentally unwell Americans. There also aren’t enough residency positions available to significantly expand the profession any time soon.
The Price of Fearmongering
While Drake doesn’t go into the causes behind the mental health crisis, it’s fairly obvious that this is the price society is paying for our government’s ill-conceived and irrational pandemic measures and the nonstop fearmongering. NPR contributor Kat Lonsdorf describes the constant fear of kidney transplant patient Jullie Hoggan:7
“While the surgery was successful and Hoggan is now vaccinated and boosted, she is still severely immunocompromised and has to take significant safety measures.
‘I’m so nervous. Like, my heart rate is through the roof when I’m out for anything,’ she said. ‘And I wonder if I’m ever able to be out safely again and be normal and go out to a store. Am I going to be feeling that forever?’
Hoggan works from home, rarely leaves the house, and when she does, it’s incredibly stressful. Her husband and college-age daughter both wear masks at home and have to be extremely careful about who they see and what they do.
Hoggan’s pandemic experience carries no violence and there have been no explosions or assault, which is why she has a hard time calling it trauma. But Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), says viewing the world as unsafe can be a symptom of trauma.”
A Nebulous and Hard-to-Define Trauma
As noted by Lonsdorf, trauma typically involves some kind of life-threatening event or something that leaves you feeling fearful and/or helpless. Many who have religiously followed mainstream news over the past two years have clearly been traumatized, feeling as though death is imminent and there’s no escape. The death-dealing blow — in the form of an invisible virus — could come from anyone, including loved ones. No one was “safe” to be around.
What’s more, the pandemic wasn’t an isolated incident that could be processed and recovered from. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist with expertise in collective trauma, likens the pandemic to a “slow-moving disaster” that “escalated in intensity over time” — and to this day doesn’t have a clear endpoint.8
Not everyone agrees that what we’re seeing is the result of collective trauma, though. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score” — one of the most-sold books on Amazon during the pandemic — is hesitant to categorize the pandemic as a collective trauma.
He tells Lonsdorf,9 “We need to be very precise … because if we don’t know what we are treating, we may give the wrong treatment.” He believes we need “a new term, a new language” to accurately define our circumstances. “That’s really what I’m encouraging us to do — to really identify what is making us all feel like we’re barely hanging on,” he says.
Officials Are Unwilling to Let Go of the Fearmongering
Whatever we end up calling it, it’s clear that our government’s and media’s response to the pandemic has been a key causative factor behind this mental health crisis. It’s also notable that even though COVID-19 has become endemic in most parts of the world, causing few deaths, the pandemic has not officially been declared “over.”
In early March 2022, the World Health Organization said discussions about when and how to declare an end to the pandemic were underway, but that “we are not there yet.”10
Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. have functionally declared an end to their national emergencies by lifting all or most restrictions, but other countries, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong, are moving in the opposite direction, renewing lockdown orders amid fresh surges in COVID cases (i.e., positive PCR tests, which doesn’t mean people are dying or even getting seriously ill).11
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