And then the COVID‑19 pandemic hit.
Mental Health in a Society Gone Mad; Thread 1/30
Suicide was at the highest level in decades (@CDCgov) with more Americans dying of suicide EVERY year, then in the ENTIRE Vietnam War. 2/30
Opioids, which numbs life’s pain & anxiety, are at crisis levels.
There are over 1M suicide attempts EVERY year in the US! 3/30
Ours is a broken society & every mental health metric paints a picture of people crying out for radical change. 5/30
The diagnosis is systemic & thus, the solution must also be systemic 6/30
It leaves people (at least those without access to leftist critiques of society), without even a language of systemic analysis & oppression.
Thus, many internalize their pain & suffering as their own failings! 9/30
For example, Capitalism is inherently alienating & soul-crushing, leaving approximately 85% of workers “not engaged” & unfulfilled at their jobs. 11/30
Capitalism is systematic injustice. 12/30
Capitalism systematically rewards heartlessness & callousness while punishing empathy & compassion: 13/30
That feeling is called alienation & it's PERVASIVE in the US 15/30
We are forced to contort our authentic selves into gendered boxes of what it means to be a ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ 16/30
All these stats are even worse for our more vulnerable communities: POC, indigenous, disabled, etc. 17/30
All of this takes a toll on mental health. 18/30
From a young age, girls & boys are still tracked along highly gendered trajectories. 21/30
Quality-education discrimination, hiring discrimination, pay discrimination, lending discrimination & various layers of economic discrimination exist systematically in the US. 22/30
Institutional racism takes a massive toll on mental health. 24/30
US immigration policy is racist, cruel & traumatizing. 25/30
And all this takes its toll too. 26/30
The diagnosis is capitalism, anti-democratic authoritarianism, racism, sexism, homophobia & transphobia.
The prescription is radical change for the better. 28/30
A society that inherently maximizes human fulfillment & potential, rather than what we are currently enduring: a sick & broken potential-destroying society of oppression, alienation & anxiety. 30/30