Despite widespread promises of reform after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, in 2023, police killed at least 1,246 people — the most in more than a decade. This police violence is intertwined with a parallel public policy disaster: America’s abysmal mental health systems that force police officers to function as de facto mental health workers. People with unmet mental health needs are 16 times more likely to be killed by police, and a quarter of all those killed by police since 2015 were perceived to be suffering from a mental health crisis.
Meanwhile, there is now an historic amount of money flowing through the mental health industry, and the U.S. spends more on mental health services than almost any other nation. Yet mental health has only been worsening. In 2023, more than 50,000 Americans died by suicide — the highest number on record, even as the proportion of people taking antidepressants has more than doubled over the past two decades and nearly a quarter of adults are now taking at least one prescribed psychiatric medication. Nearly half of all adults recently reported that they believe they have needed mental health treatment over the past year but have not received it. But what few recognize is that the currently dominant framework for addressing mental health, which focuses on reactive medical treatment while neglecting preventive social support, is itself a root cause of our collective disease.