CHECKING IN ON AMERICA™
Emotional support delivered proactively by actual, caring, skilled human beings
America has fundamentally misdiagnosed and mismanaged the mental health crisis.
By scaling the delivery of emotional support, we can reverse the mental health crisis, ward off potential mental health problems, and transform American society.
THE PROBLEM
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 worsen—anxiety, loneliness, depression, divorce, social discord, drug use, child abuse, violent crime and suicide are all on the rise.
Rather than undertake a comprehensive solution search for the cause, we've pumped money into expanding access to clinical resources, developing misguided mobile apps, and medicating human experience with little impact on the problem.
Moreover, in pharmacizing worry, pathologizing sadness, and medicalizing loneliness, we've appropriated scarce resources and treatment capacity away from the small but critical population of Americans with profound mental illnesses requiring critical treatment.
When we accept the premise that much of our suffering hinges on a broad lack of emotional support, it becomes clear—we must change our approach to addressing America's mental health crisis.
HOW WE GOT HERE
Mental health problems are not just acute disorders impacting a small population of unlucky Americans. They are symptoms of emotional support deficiencies—akin to malnourishment caused by inadequate nutrition.
For most of human history, people received emotional support so organically—as a natural byproduct of interacting with tight-knit communities of friends, family, teachers, and colleagues—that we failed to identify it as a discrete human need.
A primary function of these communities was to engage, care for, and support people who struggled. These struggles were regarded as ordeals, not diseases; and people suffering through ordeals were cared for as family, not patients.
For most of human history, people received emotional support so organically—as a natural byproduct of interacting with tight-knit communities of friends, family, teachers, and colleagues—that we failed to identify it as a discrete human need.
A primary function of these communities was to engage, care for, and support people who struggled. These struggles were regarded as ordeals, not diseases; and people suffering through ordeals were cared for as family, not 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.
CORRECTING THE DIAGNOSIS
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.
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.
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.
The solution would positively
transform American society.
A NEW APPROACH TO MENTAL HEALTH
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: