Our Mental Health Crisis is a Values Crisis

We have made a choice.

Not quietly.
Not accidentally.
Not without consequence.

We have chosen to be a nation that does not guarantee authentic and truthful mental health care around the clock.
That does not ensure affordable housing, stable utilities, or reliable access to food.
That keeps long-term, safe, kind—yes, even luxurious—mental health care out of reach for the majority.

We have chosen to call this normal.

We have chosen to medicate away reasonable human responses to prolonged harm, rather than change the conditions causing that harm.
We prescribe coping instead of justice.
Compliance instead of care.
Endurance instead of repair.

We ask people to adjust to the unbearable—
and then label them disordered when they cannot.

We have chosen collective denial.

We train ourselves not to see what is obvious.
Not to name what is systemic.
Not to challenge what is cruel.

We scapegoat parents instead of confronting the structures that corner families.
We individualize suffering that is clearly social.
We shame people for breaking under weight that was never meant to be carried alone.

And then something else happens.

Outsiders arrive—
declaring themselves experts on lives they have never lived,
on communities they have never sat with,
on pain they have never had to survive.

Their expertise is thin.
And the proof is simple:

They do not demand better.

Not better housing.
Not better wages.
Not universal mental health care.
Not rest.
Not safety.
Not dignity.

They do not pressure leaders to change the conditions that would actually improve mental wellness for everyone.

Instead, they diagnose.
They moralize.
They lecture.
They prescribe silence.

This is not ignorance.
It is avoidance.

Because demanding better would require courage.
It would require conflict.
It would require choosing people over profit, truth over comfort, care over control.

And so we live with the consequences of the choice we’ve made.

But let’s be honest about what this is.

This is not a mental health crisis.
It is a values crisis.

And until we choose differently,
no amount of pretending
will make this reality disappear.

*”Calling the police” is not a long-term mental health solution and they will tell you that themselves.

We are the wealthiest nation on earth. Where are our answers and responses to mental health?