I was so pleased to be informed about the lack of need for expanded mental health care for children, authored by the eminent wrestling scholar Linda McMahon and the highly credentialed expert conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. (“Our plan to make America’s kids healthy again”; Sept. 11). Why if I had only known that throwing kids outside to play, and giving them a bowl of granola would have solved all, I could have avoided 50 years doing trauma therapy and turned my attention to a career as a lousy folk-singer or semi-talented woodworker.
Want to know one of the major reasons for all the mental health problems I treated? Poverty. Sure, there were some victims of pedophiles and others of misogyny. But a lot of what I saw was disintegration of family life due to intense stress. Parents trying to work two or three minimum wage jobs have little time for healthy meal prep. Tempers flare, substance abuse as escape increases, crimes of hopelessness increase. Families dissolve.
There’s an old cartoon that illustrates the destruction of the working class and much of the middle class well. Three people sit around a table, a banker, a tradesperson, and a teacher. All have plates in front of them. There’s a plate in the middle holding one cookie. The banker’s plate has nine cookies. And the banker says to the tradesperson “That teacher is trying to steal your cookie.”
For at least 40 years the Republican Party has tried to sell that message to working families with great success. Persons who need anything are “lazy, immoral, stealing from you.” And the solution is to take health care coverage away, let families try to live on the streets, then roust them up as “undesirables.”
Want to know some major ways to reduce the mental health needs of children? A fair minimum wage. Health care for all. Free college or trades school. Taxing the billionaires.
Try that and watch child mental health problems and signs of social disintegration diminish.
I would have given anything to have been put out of business by a fairer society.