The Looming Mental Health Crisis, MLK, and Why You Should Delete Your Facebook
The Looming Mental Health Crisis We Are Not Prepared For
The way in which the Coronavirus pandemic has unfolded in the United States has set the stage for a massive mental health crisis. When you combine the extended periods of isolation with a devastating economic downturn punctuated by 40 million people losing their jobs, mass casualties, health anxiety, intense political division and social unrest, you have the perfect recipe for a mental health catastrophe.
Even if we just look at the impact of the severe economic downturn on its own, we’d be in trouble. Studies have found that there is a causal influence between unemployment and depression/suicidal thinking, and that unemployed people are 2-3 times more likely to die from suicide. Research has also found that unemployment leads to increased risky alcohol consumption, substance abuse, and illicit drug use. And we’re seeing these results play out in real time already. Over 40 states have reported a rise in opioid overdose deaths.
We weren’t prepared for the opioid crisis before the pandemic. Our labyrinthine, for-profit healthcare system makes it all but impossible to offer medication assisted treatment—the most effective treatment for opioid use disorder—to everyone who needed it. More broadly, we have never made mental health care a priority in this country. We’ve made strides, but we still have a long way to go in dismantling the stigma around mental illness.
If we think we can tackle this with our current resources, we are entirely delusional. A study completed in 2014 linked 10,000 suicides around the world to the great recession of 2007-09. This could be far worse than that.
If we were prepared for this crisis, the future would still be daunting, but the failures of our system, and our refusal to plan for the resulting psychological fallout make the prospect all the more menacing.
Right now, a litany of insurance plans are split, with the main insurer covering medical expenses, and a secondary insurer covering mental health—and this is for plans that cover mental health care in the first place, many do not. This split makes billing for mental health services obscenely complicated, and often results in confusion for patients and staff over prior authorizations for treatment and medications, as well as out-of-pocket costs for various treatments. We cannot continue to function in this way and expect to effectively combat this impending crisis.
We need to be planning for this now. Since there is no chance we’d be able to transform our health care system in time—and neither candidate wants to do that anyway—we should be working to dramatically expand telehealth so that anyone who needs to be seen—or in some cases heard—by a mental health professional, can be.
As Covid-19 sunk its fangs into the stars and stripes, various telehealth waivers were issued throughout the country so patients would be able to use video or phone conferencing to attend appointments with their clinicians. Prior to this, obtaining a waiver for remote mental health care was a fairly arduous task, when it was an option at all. It is imperative, not only that all of these waivers are made permanent, but that all clinicians and patients have the technological capability to treat patients in this manner.
The federal government needs be making plans to intervene and subsidize the mental health care costs for everyone who lives here. It we really want to meet this impending crisis head on, that’s what we need to do. The current administration will never do that. They’re too busy trying to kneecap the Affordable Care Act and defund Medicare and Medicaid.
The Biden campaign has offered a broad framework of changes to our health care system, but not much in the way of specifics in terms of tackling this impending crisis.
We need to be preemptive.
We need a plan, and we need it now.
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Delete Your Facebook
Facebook has had a lot of chances to clean up their platform, to do the right thing, to delete the neo-nazis and white supremacists who use their website to spread disinformation and form online militias that often evolve into actual militias. Time and time again they’ve failed.
So, you should stop using Facebook. Remove your support from that platform.
Every time the failures of Facebook are brought up, every time Zuckerberg or an acolyte appears before congress we get a bevy of assurances that are then, at least it appears, completely ignored. Recently this lack of action on their part may have led to two people being killed and another being wounded in Kenosha, Wisconsin by a 17 year old with an assault rifle.
A militia page calling for people to bring firearms to the protests in Kenosha was, according to reporting by Buzz Feed, reported to Facebook 455 times.
455 times.
The page was in blatant violation of Facebook’s terms. And yet, the page remained up for days. And the aforementioned 17 year old, who is currently charged with intentional homicide, traveled across state lines with a weapon, just like the post instructed. Now we don’t know if the suspect went to that specific page, but it really doesn’t matter. Thousands of people did go to that page. And 455 of those people reported that page, and Facebook did nothing to address it. This enormous, powerful platform was being used to incite hate and promote violence. Two people are dead.
In Zuckerberg’s apology, he said the page remained up, “largely due to an operational mistake.”
How many times is Mark Zuckerberg going to apologize for the failures of his company before people stand up and leave the platform? Seriously, what will it take?
Remember Cambridge Analytica? You’re forgiven if you don’t since in 2020 news cycle years it happened approximately 147 years ago. But it was in 2018 when Facebook got into big trouble when it came to light that a data firm called Cambridge Analytica, who was working by the Trump campaign, was able to access the private data on 87 million Facebook users.
In the fallout Facebook lost some money and some users, but it still currently has an estimated 2.7 billion users.
During the pandemic Mark Zuckerberg has made $25 billion which brings his net worth to 109 billion. Another centibillionaire. Isn’t that lovely. With Bezos and Gates that makes three. Zuckerberg is raking in money while white supremacists use his platform to spread a vile and deadly ideology.
Get rid of Facebook.
It’s time.
Really, it is.
Use Instagram, or hell, use Twitter. I know Instagram is owned by Facebook, but it seems to be far more effective at monitoring hate and propaganda. Hell, even the tornadic cesspool that is Twitter does a better job.
Get off Facebook. You won’t miss it.
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Blast From The Past
This is a piece I published in 2017 on the white-washing of Dr.Martin Luther King’s Jr’s legacy. The man was considered a radical, a disrupter. In 1966, MLK had an approval rating of 33%. He was a freedom fighter, and he had no time for protest-demeaning moderates who were inconvenienced by civil disobedience.
[Click the photo to read.]
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In Case You Missed It
Here’s another visual article/slideshow thing you may have missed on the racist origins of the electoral college and why it needs to be abolished. Click to open.
This is a video piece from myself and producers/editors Aaron Vazquez and Brian “Sene” Marc on redlining and the burbs.
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A while back I created a few comics with artist Adam Ortiz called: The Downward Eyeful
Here’s our first collaboration.
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Soundtrack
[click to listen, or click here for the full, ongoing LR soundtrack on Spotify]
Nina Simone- Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out
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Orgs to Support
(If you have the means, speak with your wallet)
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So that’s…something.
Quote from god himself: "Stop be nob".
Local man screams on internet to 50 readers that they should no longer invest time into a billion dollar company's social platform because in one micro-community their policy wasn't enforced.