At a recent rally, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy stood on an Ohio gubernatorial platform that includes reopening mental institutions.
Ramaswamy has said as much before, arguing as he campaigned for president in 2023 that the “No. 1 psychiatric institution today” is jail. He echoes the same sentiment now, that “we are going to bring back the psychiatric institutions that were wrongfully shuttered.”
We are also going to see pushback from the Left, but it will conveniently avoid the reality that the ideology has created: Impressions of American mental health are deeply distorted.
That reality issues from a youth population condemned to perpetually online life. Young people’s mental health has plummeted in the last 15 years, due in large part to social media activity. A combination of screen time, sleep deprivation, content exposure, and negative relational effects is one explanation from only a few likely factors. The boom of smartphone technology caught most parents unawares — but now, as conservatives push to regulate the internet, left-leaning advocates obscure morality and dismiss parents.
Social media and its counterparts contribute to the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and other behavioral disorders. Today, it keeps them more relatable than ever. Mental illness is as ubiquitous as researchers tell us, and knowledge of that fact is unavoidable for a young person who scrolls through the countless TikTok and Instagram posts voicing personal experience. The pattern makes for a crisis associated with paranoia, but not with the sense of imminence that should accompany it.
Most mental illnesses are thus leveled to the noise of social media. Minor, more simply solved conditions are amplified, while debilitating, psychiatric ones — such as would belong to the realm of the institution — are reduced to the sphere of online sharing. When people actually come across them in people living on the streets, they do not know what to do: Onlookers either are numb to the spectacle or jarred by its severity.
The more “minor” conditions certainly can be severe as well. Especially as they manifest themselves in young women, they are some of the worst. However severe, severity is the new normal.
Part of that has to do with ubiquity, as explained, but much of it is intentional disillusionment. For years, the Left has turned on an effort to make no one feel bad for being different, even more to make no one know that they are wrong. Gender dysphoria is the premier example of our day. Terrible conditions are even further suppressed, until, again, they are level with normalcy.
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Of course, this does not work. Societal unrest springs up in favor of the truth, whether or not its inhabitants aim for it. We see this happen most saliently with the epidemic of disintegrated homeless people, many of whom are severely mentally ill. They can, and should, find solace in the mental institution. Abuse and corruption warranted calls for their shutdown in the first place, but it is “indefensible” to claim that they cannot be corrected and used for good.
The problem is that the path of reform is increasingly unimaginable to generations who know the institution only as a nonentity. Progressive politickers shout that mental institutions, nursing homes, and the like are mere travesty. They are the same group of people who advocate, with every fiber of their ideology, against the family.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
