Mental health is the thing that America likes to shove under the carpet. The problem doesn't exist. We can ignore it.
Or maybe America is utterly clueless about what mental health is.
What is it like to be mentally healthy? Do we know?
For example, the rampant fetishes.
The gun fetish.
The god fetish.
We seem to be moving, if stumbling quite a bit, away from the gay fetish, the hysteria surrounding sexual identity.
We are beginning to understand why people are mentally unhealthy, although I'm not sure we have nailed down what actually enjoying a good state of mental health is.
Admittedly a decent state of mental health may be relative to environment, historical conditions, mass thought, a number of other variables like, possibly, Fox so-called news.
What about the tendency to be taken in by Hitler-like ravings, I don't want to name any names here but there are a lot of huge media figures that I find pretty iffy in that area.
Then, there is the problem of delivery of mental well-being, for example, in the case of a chemical imbalance needing medication that a person refuses to take. There are other cases of mental instability caused by physical problems that are impossible to treat. America does not have a system in place to handle these sorts of problems.
Are there countries in the world presently who are delivering a decent level of mental health care? If so, what are they doing and what can we learn from them?
Fixing the environment using Maslow's hierarchy of human needs as a workable model is a beginning. But even so, in the best of environments, mental illness exists.
And, it is difficult to enjoy mental health in a war zone. There are a lot of war zones in the world. We might like to take a look at the forces that create war and the motivations of greed that prompt these forces.
Then, there's the issue of greed itself. Is greed a mental illness?
Is selfishness a mental illness? Personally, I think Ayn Rand was an irrational nutcase -- and bad cess to her followers as well.
Note: Had a look at Maslow extensive list of the stuff of self actualization, whatever that might be, and I totally flunk.
What the hell is self-actualization anyway?