The recent shootings across the country and the number of suicides over the past week are yet another example of mental health crisis and reminder that mental health is a long game.
We must stop waiting for people to become suicidal, homicidal, or genesidal before doing anything about it. Instead of investing primarily in reacting to crises and creating awareness campaigns that simply show how many of these incidents are happening, we should invest in meaningful countermeasures that reduce the likelihood of these tragedies occurring in the first place.
Even though we are doing a much better job of intervening we are still lacking a proactive approach. We shouldn’t just wait until something bad happens. We should start thinking about how to prevent those events from happening altogether.
We should start thinking about how to build a generation of people who possess the skills necessary to navigate the stressors of life without becoming so overwhelmed that they resort to taking lives of other people or raising lethal weapons against themselves.
Mental health is not just another social problem among many others; it is one of the foundational factors that influences everything else. It is deeply connected to many of the other most pressing challenges facing our society today.
We need comprehensive mental health reform that will meaningfully reduce the number of people living with untreated or inadequately treated mental health conditions. Doing so has the potential to reduce many of the other problems affecting society, including violent crimes, homicides, carjackings, domestic violence, substance abuse, homelessness, drug overdoses, the opioid epidemic, white collar crime, family breakdowns, and many other social challenges.
Yet much of our attention is directed toward reforming the consequences of our mental health system failures. We remain focused primarily on managing the outcomes rather than preventing many of the conditions that contribute to them in the first place.
We are throwing mental health resources against the wall to see what sticks. Unfortunately, thus far, nothing ain't sticking.
What we need is mental health reform before our house burns completely to the ground and our next generation has no idea what to do with themselves.