“Psychiatry is a racket,” my friend Evan declares. He’s recently gone off Lithium after it started destroying his kidneys. After years of relying on the medication to treat Bipolar disorder, he’s now microdosing psilocybin mushrooms instead and finding the treatment just as, if not more, effective.
But even the success of this treatment, repeated ad nauseam across a mass media in the throes of its honeymoon phase with psychedelic therapy, is — in Evan’s mind — really still just a bandaid.
“You know what would really help my anxiety?” he asks. “Affordable housing. Not having to work 80 hours a week to pay the rent.”
He is, emphatically, not wrong. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health published a comprehensive study in 2015 detailing the relationship between housing insecurity and mental health. Unaffordable housing straps resources for resilience and increases stress, reducing a household’s ability to pay for other necessities, including mental health care, and creating perpetual anxiety about housing stability. Not having stable housing has been shown to increase rates of depression and anxiety, and homelessness in particular can compound or create serious mental health problems.
Access to stable housing and employment, nutritious food, adequate healthcare, and belonging in a social group all correlate strongly with improved mental health outcomes. On the flip side, poverty, exposure to violence and oppression by one’s society all contribute to worsened mental health outcomes.
On a subtler level, cultural narratives can wreak havoc on mental health as well. In highly individualistic societies such as the U.S., cultural values can give rise to the belief that the individual is responsible for problems in their life that actually stem from societal issues, leading to damaging experiences of shame, guilt and self-blame. For instance, in the United States, poverty is often viewed as a personal failure rather than structural failure on the part of our society and economy.
Persistent feelings of worthlessness and guilt are both considered symptoms of major depression…More
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