What's Could Finally End the U.S. Mental Health Crisis

Key points

The U.S. mental health care crisis continues to worsen.

Medicine is not likely to voluntarily correct its focus on physical disease, nor its profit motives.

Only an angry public can overcome the chronic inertia.

Americans have lived with a mental health crisis for as long as most of us can remember. And for just as long, medicine has been warned of two urgent fixes.

First, the system must produce more psychiatrists. 1 Second, medical education must prepare primary care physicians—who provide 75 percent of all mental health care—to recognize and manage psychiatric illness. 2 Neither has happened. And almost no one pressed for what, in my opinion, is a key third fix: weaving psychology and other mental health professionals into the very fabric of medicine.

The conseq