The Social Security Net for Mental Illness

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/nyregion/nyc-mental-illness-breakdowns.html

This took a while to get through.

In a nutshell, its tracking de-institutionalisation of acute mental health since the 1960s up to the present.

What the article totally elides from view and does not deal with in any substantive way; is the rise and rise of individualism; tenacious recognition struggles of identities; the rise of affective emotion frames of reference to understand peoples status as individuals and does not deal with the history of IQ testing and status streaming of potential.

And does not deal with the rise and rise of neural to almost oligarchic levels in varying conduits of multivalent transfers, across so many social spheres.

It is distorting to frame these issues as solely public health, when the vast bulk of these presenting issues upstream, can be better grasped in social streams of development, instead of an over-reliance on very dated ideas.

For example, Roberts et al 1974-2018 research articles 26,000, produced a finding that 5% of publications examined Race, and for Cognitive Psychology, the figures even drop lower, to 0.1%.

My question is, how are cognitive processes universal, when greatest % of acute difficulty is often mixed race/ethnic?

'Only a handful of top tier of cognitive journals such as auditory processes, categorisation and memorisation, do indeed vary as a function of racialized experiences' (Roberts 2020).

In the Bodies Keep Coming (2023), here is how a Black Trauma Surgeon framed the stakes https://www.aamc.org/news/bodies-keep-coming

"Nationwide, young Black men aged 15 to 34 represent 2 percent of the population but 37 percent of gun homicides. Some people call my patients victims of “Black-on-Black” violence, but I remind them: interpersonal violence is a byproduct of proximity and we live in a mostly segregated country. Since we have sorted ourselves into homogenous racial and ethnic neighborhoods, a result is that “white-on-white violence” occurs at the same rate, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

I also remind them Black men are fatally shot by police at more than twice the rate of white people, even though white men are more likely to be armed in the same scenario. And each year, more people are shot and killed by police than in all the mass shootings combined. The extremes to which America contorts its values to minimize all these deaths are untenable"

Brian H. Williams, MD, is the author of The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal.

I am currently reading 2022 ed PTSD Oxford Handbook, mainly women authors.

https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34728

What is particularly striking is how senior women authors have largely sat into research norms and are primarily reproducing the male inheritance of methods and methodology-the Classification and Phenomenology and Epidemiology of mental health.

Re the tales of two cities, re work, becoming ill, dealing with abusive relationships, homelessness and so on, at best, we are getting pastoral and folk tale and tokenism level understanding of social and economic structures as enacted in the sovereign sense of self in relation to social cognition, identity and inter-group relations.

It does not surprise me that politicians seek refuge in academic knowledge power houses of global health metrics, because it largely takes the spotlight off profound political failures of governance.

The main article does not deal with the opioids and it does not deal with vast health disparities in poor white communities and gun and knife violence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/nyregion/nyc-mental-ill-subway-violence.html