The Conservative Case Against Mental Health
President Obama gave a speech about bringing mental health "out of the shadows" on Monday, and because he is for it, that means somebody has to be against it. Take, for example, The Daily Caller's Neil Munro, who makes the case that Obama is furthering Americans down an SSRI-blanketed path to sissiness. "Americans have typically responded to stress and sadness by urging stoicism, hard work, marriage, prayer and personal initiative, and by stigmatizing unemployment and passivity," Munro writes. "The [mental health] industry's professionals have long opposed those traditional responses, urged greater federal funding of their industry and sought to reverse public stigma against the use of their services." First they stopped the witch burning, but I said nothing, as I was not a witch burner.
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In fairness to Munro, he was not one of many calling for more money for mental health programs instead of new gun rules after the Sandy Hook shootings; he believed marriage was a cure for depression back then, too. Under the headline "Cultural issues, mental health, video-game violence all on table for White House gun control push," Munro wrote on December 18:
Sebelius is already rolling out a wave of health-care regulations under the Obamacare takeover of the nation’s health sector. That gives her enormous influence over measures intended to shape character and behavior under rules for “mental health” spending.
But Munro shouldn't be too worried. Just a glance out my New York window tells me that, as we did back in the good old days, we sometimes still leave people who are suffering from mental illness to rot in the gutter until they are inspired by their starvation and festering wounds to start handing out resumés. It's going to start working any minute now. We should commend Munro for being brave enough to advocate expanding this method of treatment to a broader population.
