Cheap and effective mental health everywhere?

Where’s the mental health aspirin?

We know the home remedy answer to our moodiness and troubled thinking is not a pill. In mental health, every pill has consequences, and self-medicating is a disaster.

In mental health, the cheap and effective answer to trouble is connecting with other people, and peaceful surroundings, some guidance, some comfort. More sleep. A cup of tea. Prayer if you like. Some exercise. Less stress.

Is there a prescribed dosage for less stress?

The standard protocols for mental health do not operate in the part of the world that is capable of dosing us with less stress. Your doctor won’t tell your boss to be more kind and send you to the resort. 

And in many places, even in our modern world, there is no doctor anyway. Some of my readers say they can’t get an appointment for months. Readers send me emails about this.

You are so right that we need experts, treatment centers and ordinary people to help. I unfortunately live in an area with its collective head in the sand, where the only resource for people with mental health issues is to wait as many as three weeks before speaking to a psychiatrist on a television screen. I know of two people who had suicidal thoughts and were told they needed to wait to see a doctor, but if they really felt like killing themselves to call the suicide prevention hotline.  

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I have a daughter and a sister who are bipolar. We live in a rural community where professional help is extremely difficult to have. Tomorrow I am taking my sister for an appointment with her psychiatrist. She can only see her ONCE every THREE months!!

Both of these readers live in civilized places.

Mental health resources are badly distributed because within our economic universe a kind of gravity forms around money and reimbursable service user populations.  This gravitational force attracts service providers and professionalized resources. In the US, the free market Big Bang of medical mental health economics created a clumpy universe of resources and institutions concentrated in densely populated areas.

What can people do if they live somewhere away from the clumps? 

What is available if professional resources are restricted or rationed or nowhere nearby?