James Donaldson on Mental Health - How mental health system failures are driven by political, social policies

By Amy Roeder Too often, mental health systems around the world fail people with psychosocial disabilities, according to Harvard T.H.

Chan School of Public Health’s Alicia Ely Yamin .

In the March 18 episode of the Mad in America podcast, Yamin— an adjunct senior lecturer on health policy and management at Harvard T.H.

Chan School of Public Health and director of the Global Health and Rights Project at Harvard Law School—emphasized the importance of seeing mental health as a human rights issue and stressed the need for policies that get at the root causes of mental distress.

For example, she noted that there are more diagnosed cases of postpartum depression in the U.S than in other high-income countries with more generous social safety nets and family leave policies.

Failing to provide adequate support to a new mother is a political failure, Yamin said, yet the condition is often treated as a personal defect.

“Health is a very acute reflection of patterns of justice and injustice,” Yamin said.

There’s no magic bullet for fixing the mental health system, she said.

“But the start is developing public policies that treat people, in all their diversity, as political and moral equals, and then devising social policies that put that into effect.”