White House Launches “MentalHealth.Gov”

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The White House launched its website featuring “stories of hope and recovery from mental health problems”, intended to instigate a “national dialogue” about mental health and to de-stigmatize mental illness in our culture, encouraging people to “get the help they need.” The website features, among other testimonials, actress Glenn Close’s challenge to “every American family to no longer whisper about mental illness behind closed doors.”

MentalHealth.gov →

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Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole, MFT, founding editor of Mad in America, works in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a couples and family therapist. Inspired by Open Dialogue, he works as part of a team and consults with couples and families that have members identified as patients. His work in residential treatment — largely with severely traumatized and/or "psychotic" clients — led to an appreciation of the power and beauty of systemic philosophy and practice, as the alternative to the prevailing focus on individual pathology. A former film-maker, he has undergraduate and master's degrees in psychology from Harvard University, as well as an MFT degree from the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate with the Taos Institute and the Free University of Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected].

18 COMMENTS

  1. I filled out their survey suggesting they offer more answers to the problems of human rights violations in the mental health system and also the problem of big pharma having a monopoly on our (consumers) minds. Thanks for letting us know. Peace, Nancy

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  2. I had a look at the website and didn’t find it terribly informative. Nowhere is it mentioned that seeking psychiatric help can expose you to forced treatment and that the only way to guarantee yourself against forced treatment is to avoid a psychiatric diagnosis altogether. Perhaps the website is designed only for those with very minor mental health concerns. In any event, there’s no new information here.

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  3. “Help us bring this issue out of the shadows of our society because it affects one in four Americans.
    – Senator Gordon Smith”

    In English: “Help us sell even More of the same garbage while calling it medicine.”

    We (government) have promises to keep and friends to reward.

    http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/2012/07/j-parented-obamacare-administrative.html

    And we (government) are also suffering from a selective case of Hearing Impairment.

    http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/white-house-petition-seeks-investigation-into-school-shootings-and-psychiatric-drugs/

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  4. “Depression is a disorder of the brain” “Bipolar disorder … usually lasts a lifetime” “Researchers think brain circuits may not work properly in people who have OCD” “Schizophrenia is a severe, lifelong brain disorder” – not the greatest site, IMHO.
    Best to all on this site, rob purssey

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    • Government and the quack “researchers”, stopped listening to the people who actually suffer the problems they claim to be talking about, long ago. It’s all about treating life’s problems as being “just like diabetes”, in total it adds up to cargo cult science with the untrammeled power to use force against you and your kids or elderly parents, and the saddest and most heartbreaking realization of many of our lives.

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  5. Re: Affordable Care Act (aka, ObamaCare)

    What happens if the federal government decides that it is far more “cost effective” for the system (to be put in place in the near future)to put people diagnosed with “severe mental illness” on drugs and *keep* them on drugs?

    They might start with diabetes – a person *has* to take insulin shots, to prevent more costly measures down the road…

    They could begin to use this argument for any disease, or in this case, non-disease.

    Nobody read the bill before it became law.

    None of us are privy to what HHS is doing behind the scenes, which will likely be hundreds of thousands of pages of administrative law…

    Who’s to say what will happen with “mental health care” with this federal government?

    A website, to begin with…

    Followed by more “education”…
    Followed by an enormous increase in “care”…

    And more force?
    Who knows?

    Duane

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  6. The site is more of the same, more of the scary same. How sad. We must keep working for what we want because it seems as though our ‘government’ has bought into the drugging and forced drugging model.
    Some parts of the site are good just as some drug company sites are informative (eat well, sleep well, have friends, talk about life). How sad that teachers are buying into this biological model and there are free curriculum guides. But where is the scientific truth? Where are the biological indicators? People need to work with people. This takes time and there is no take a pill for compassion.

    Please please stop forcibly drugging our children, our family members. Please stop telling them it is the only way.

    Stop holding children down and injecting them with mind altering drugs. Drug companies and psychiatrists are creating trauma that will take years for society to recover from.
    The USA government new website is promoting this.

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  7. All people need to make this clarification and distinction:

    There is mental HEALTH and there is mental “illness”. They’re NOT the same thing.

    Having mental HEALTH, in a complex world, can be beyond frustrating. It can be outright maddening and even infuriating.

    Mental stress, confusion and conflicts (saying the least) to the point of “illness” is NOT a state of mental “Health”.

    I truly think most people do not know the differences and distinctions between the two states of mind.

    Again, mental HEALTH can be … well, almost torturous.

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