News outlets calling it a "mental health crisis" is just sleigh-of-hand, obscuring the root causes. It's natural to feel more stressed, anxious, or depressed if you're losing hope in life due to inflation, lagging pay, expensive healthcare, sky-high real estate costs, etc. Not to mention the general greedy nickel-and-diming that is present from most corporations, hedge funds, investors -- all of these small cuts and bruises add up to a very wounded animal.
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.
Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving money to special interests (airlines for example) and big businesses in various ways.
I recently read a NYT opinion piece that very eloquently laid out this idea: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-...
Btw one favorite quote from that NYT article:
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.