A New Social Movement to Improve Mental Health Care – Dr. Tom Insel, Chairman of the Steinberg Institute

What this episode covers

Dr. Tom Insel wanted to know why life was not better for mental health patients. Neuroscience and psychiatry had made significant advances in the decades since he entered the fields. More people with mental illnesses were getting treated than ever before. “And yet,” he tells host Rishi Desai, the “outcomes were no better.” In working on the forthcoming book Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, he found the problem was “we were aiming for the wrong target.” In our focus on reducing discrete symptoms, he says, we lost site of the more essential project: helping patients to have a life. Dr. Insel believes we have failed people with mental illnesses, and nothing short of a political movement is required to mend the social wounds that have formed out of this neglect. In the complex age of social media toxicity, mass-incarceration, and endemic homelessness, the question of treating mental health conditions, he believes, is so much bigger than one of Prozac dosages. Tune in to learn about what he thinks needs to happen now, and about MindSite News (mindsitenews.org) a new nonprofit, digital journalism project reporting on mental health in America.

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