CHECKING IN ON AMERICA™
Emotional support delivered proactively by actual, caring, skilled human beings
America has fundamentally misdiagnosed and mismanaged the mental health crisis.
Mental health problems are not just acute disorders impacting a small population of unlucky Americans—they are symptoms caused by deficiencies of emotional support, no different than symptoms of malnourishment caused by inadequate nutrition.
When we accurately characterize anxiety, depression, unemployment, drug use, violent crime, and suicide as symptoms of poor mental health, it becomes clear we must change our approach.
We can transform American society and help those at risk of mental health problems due to a lack of support by
scaling the delivery of emotional support.
IT’S TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK
Mental health is America’s biggest failure.
There is no sector of our economy where America spends more to get less—and faces crippling social consequences as a result.
Despite spending tens of billions of dollars annually, America’s mental health crisis continues to get worse. Anxiety, loneliness, depression, divorce, social discord, unemployment, drug use, child abuse, violent crime and suicide are all on the rise.
We know how to solve the mental health crisis. The solution would positively transform American society.
Americans—as parents, workers, children, soldiers, veterans, retirees—would be happier, stronger, more productive and more resilient.
Violent crime, incarceration, drug use, unemployment, child abuse and suicide would decline dramatically.
We can reallocate the tens of billions of dollars spent annually on legal and illegal drugs to establish a nationwide network of mental health and emotional support providers—creating a new health care discipline with millions of new well-paying jobs that could be performed anywhere in the country.
HOW WE GOT HERE
We’ve known for a long time that America’s mental health system is broken—but we still spend billions of dollars annually on the same failed solutions that broke the system:
Wasteful mental health treatments and research targeting niche phenomena and conditions
The millions of prescribed pills that Americans consume daily
“Evidence-based” treatment protocols for clinical services that only a tiny percentage of Americans can access
Tens of thousands of wellness-related mobile apps that rely on misguided AI and machine-based solutions to an inherently human problem
The overwhelming evidence demonstrates
that these solutions didn’t work before
and don’t work now.
The symptoms of inadequate mental health in younger Americans—anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-injury and suicide—continue to rise precipitously.
Acute mental health disorders in older Americans contribute directly to rising crime, high incarceration, and America’s insatiable demand for illegal drugs.
The collateral damage from untreated mental health problems is staggering—and felt every day in broken families, struggling schools, shuttered homes and stores, and broken communities.
A NEW APPROACH TO MENTAL HEALTH
We need to acknowledge the historical connection between emotional support and mental health.
For most of human history, people received emotional support so organically and so automatically that society never identified “emotional support” as a discrete human need. This support was given and received as a natural byproduct of interacting with family, friends, relatives, teachers, mentors and colleagues woven together in durable, tight-knit communities that persisted for generations.
A primary function of these communities was to engage, care for and support community members who struggled. These struggles were regarded as ordeals, not diseases; and people suffering through ordeals were cared for as family, not clinical patients.
Over the past three decades these communities and relationships have utterly fragmented—silently destroying America’s most potent and bountiful source of emotional support.
Younger generations of Americans leave their communities to pursue education, employment and other opportunities in locations far removed from where they were raised.
The Internet, social media platforms, and other online environments encouraging non-stop virtual engagement are supplanting and degrading the human relationships that traditionally promote the giving and receiving of emotional support.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these trends, severing connections to institutions (like schools, churches and community organizations) oriented around communal gathering.
We failed to understand what was happening as it was happening to us.
Instead of asking, “How do we help people rebuild connection?” we asked, “What treatment can be administered to remove the feeling of disconnection?”
Americans were conditioned to rely on mobile apps, pills, digital mood trackers, and cognitive-behavioral frameworks as a means of sanding down the sharpest edges of mental health symptoms—without prompting anyone to explore or address the underlying cause of observed mental health problems.
In the process we pharmacized worry, pathologized sadness, and medicalized loneliness as an acute disorder requiring clinical treatment—while appropriating scarce resources and treatment capacity away from the small but critical population of Americans with profound mental illnesses requiring critical treatment.
CORRECTING THE DIAGNOSIS
America has structured its entire mental health system on the unsubstantiated premise that mental health symptoms predominantly result from 1. brain illnesses, and 2. a shortage of clinical resources.
Only a tiny fraction of mental health problems requires clinical treatment.
This false assumption drives heavy investment in systems and people that are conditioned, trained, and incentivized to define and treat mental health ailments through the narrow lens of observable symptoms—in lieu of undertaking the less definitive and more labor intensive task of searching for the underlying cause of these symptoms.
The mental health crisis is not primarily a clinical problem—
—it is a human problem caused by the profound and widespread deficit of emotional support.
Studies unambiguously demonstrate that emotional support is not a luxury—it is a basic human need. The effects of isolation and loneliness create a risk of heart disease, cognitive decline, and early death equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes every day.
The solution to the mental health crisis—and the only policy response that can end this crisis—is to treat emotional support as a foundational human need and build the infrastructure required to deliver emotional support at scale to America as a whole.
As companies have demonstrated through enterprising pilot programs with public and private sector partners, “frictionless” or “zero-step access” to emotional support can be delivered to large populations at low cost—and yield tangible, measurable and significant benefits within days.
These programs should form the cornerstone of a broader public health campaign that reconceives the symptoms of deteriorating mental health as a treatable ailment that can be cured quickly and durably through the transformative power of an old and potent magic: