Coming and Previous Lectures

Modern health care wreaks havoc on patients with mental disorders, even though they are the most common health conditions in the U.S. Only 25 percent of patients, such as depression or drug abuse, receive any care at all. Medical physicians conduct more than 75 percent of this care, but it’s almost universally low quality because medicine refuses to train them to treat mental illnesses. The familiar problems of prescription overdose deaths and deaths by suicide pale before the more widespread but less-recognized effect on patients with unrecognized or inexpertly treated mental illnesses—depression, anxiety, and substance abuse being the most common. This harms not only the patients, but also families, communities, and society (costs). I will explain how this sad, inhumane situation stems from medicine’s outdated guiding theory from the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries: it dictates an isolated focus on physical diseases and dismisses the psychological and social dimensions of patients. I will contend that the public must take charge because medicine is too enamored of the status quo—“brainwashed.” Citizens will insist their politicians and policy makers ensure that mental disorders are placed on equal footing with physical diseases. I will describe exactly how to achieve this true paradigm shift politically.