Short
Observations about America and our states of mind from a Gen X, former federal policy reporter and woulda been truck driver, who has visited or lived in every American state except two, and who is currently challenging herself as proprietor of a news outlet in a town run by Christian Nationalists, also the town where the South’s first racially integrated college (read: liberal) is the largest employer. It’s going well.
Long
docu-mental has been around since the start of Substack. I don’t think he likes to admit it, but Hamish McKenzie actually pitched me to create a newsletter on his start up platform…which I did do, but then I was a disappointment in that instead, I got married, divorced, then was homeless for a while, before ending up on my feet on the edge of Appalachia, near where I was born. All the while, I was posting on docu-mental, but I wasn’t doing all the promotion that would have made me a star.
Yet somehow, I have thousands of readers, and over a thousand subscribers. So, whatever. Here we are, and you are glad about that, I am sure.
I started publishing my insights, questions, and observations about mental health in America after I won an award from a bunch of psychiatrists in Washington, DC (that sounds like a fiction prompt…but it’s not), for my ability to see into the future. Woooo. Well, my ability to spot trends in healthcare, and particularly mental health care.
In exchange, I gave a speech.
Only one of the docs in the room seemed to understand my point, because he told me how much he agreed with it. And I could be wrong about this, but those in the room who came to congratulate me after the fact missed my point entirely, and were instead focused only on the “bravery” it took to admit publicly, as I had in my speech, that I had struggled with depression earlier in my life. Of course, that was pre-covid, and now everyone is a head case, so it might not seem like I was that much of a pioneer. But I was. (BTW, psychiatrists are always the last ones to admit their depression, if they admit to it at all.)
Only bravery wasn’t my point. Using my powers of future-telling, this was the point: that in 2017, which was the year, Americans were about to face demons in a way never before experienced, and that psychiatrists were among the most trained of all professions to help folks make meaning from whatever was the matter.
And — that having things that mattered to us would be meaningful, and as they say in the medical world, “protective”, for us as we were about to go through some seriously abnormal and frightening shit (I didn't say “shit” in my speech). I mean, see how prescient I was?
Not long after, I even trademarked something about creating herd immunity to anxiety and depression. Which I stopped using when herd immunity become politicized during covid. Three thousand bucks, wasted.
Regardless, I kept on with my point, and correlated two trends I had seen over my career writing about medicine, health policy, and the business of healthcare: the more power our federal government, including the Supreme Court, gave to corporations, the more anxiety and depression and even suicide occurred in the general population. Covid was the culmination of these head games because to this day, the public doesn’t really know what the hell was going on — but we had to bear the brunt of the responsibility of it by masking and vaxxing and never asking questions.
I began to see how the less agency Americans had, the more crazy they felt themselves to be — because they were indeed being driven mad! Put simply: the less authority but more responsibility we had while billionaires stripped our lives for parts with permission from leaders with secret agendas who were telling us one thing then doing another, the more like a shit salad life in America seemed to be.
So, I spent a lot of time in these pages exploring that. I had a fantastic podcast with some impressive, and in some cases, well-known, New York Times and other bestselling authors and thinkers — those podcasts are still worth your time, even if I am not adding to them currently.
Eventually, the more I unraveled the threads of the phony American dream and how it causes cognitive dissonance — even if you happen to succeed with it — the only antidote to the growing mental health burdens (except in cases of serious mental illness) I came to find, and to which I have come back to over and again, is our connection to nature. The disconnect from nature, I observe, seems to be deliberate.
Also, the more I unraveled the nonsense of the American Dream, the more it was clear I couldn’t live the way I had been living. That’s when that new marriage ended abruptly, I was estranged from family, and I experienced the panic of homelessness for a while. This was against the backdrop of oblivion to how deeply I was grieving the death of my closest friend. All documented here!
Not to bury the lede, but to lead you to the gold: What I have observed since 2017 is that our collective mental health status is rooted in one fundamental concern: not questioning what we’re told to do — not having enough curiosity about who gets what as a result of our obedience, either to the church, a spouse, a parent, the media, or especially to Washington. This makes many things, including our separation from nature, possible.
