Comment by DharmaPolice
8 days ago
>What if they're the same levels of mental health issues as before?
Maybe but this raises the question of how on Earth we'd ever know we were on the right track when it comes to mental health. With physical diseases it's pretty easy to show that overall public health systems in the developed world have been broadly successful over the last 100 years. Less people die young, dramatically less children die in infancy and survival rates for a lot of diseases are much improved. Obesity is clearly a major problem, but even allowing for that the average person is likely to live longer than their great-grandparents.
It seems inherently harder to know whether the mental health industry is achieving the same level of success. If we massively expand access to therapy and everyone is still anxious/miserable/etc at what point will we be able to say "Maybe this isn't working".
Answer: Symptom management.
There's a whole lot of diseases and disorders we don't know how to cure in healthcare.
In those cases, we manage symptoms. We help people develop tools to manage their issues. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Same as a lot of surgeries, actually.
As the symptoms in mental illness tend to lead to significant negative consequences (loss of work, home, partner) which then worsen the condition further managing symptoms can have great positive impact.