The world may seem hard to make sense of right now, but there is one lens likely to bring everything into focus for you:  There is a massive struggle going on between forces that are grounded in reality and others hell bent on distorting or even destroying reality.

Let’s look at the dark side of the equation first.  It really shouldn’t come as any surprise that those who promote the idea of educating children to believe they might not be in the right bodies (having a gender that does not match their anatomy) are no friends of reality (i.e. truth).  There is precisely zero evidence that human beings are born with male anatomy and an XY chromosome, but are actually female.  Zero.  It is, barring any actual evidence emerging, nothing other than a dangerous fiction.

It also should not come as any surprise that companies like Facebook (now Meta) are investing in cleaving human beings from their physical and psychological realities and offering them technologies to leave reality behind—like high tech heroin.  They do this in part for profit and in part, I believe, as part of an inherent distrust of and distaste for the individual as an autonomous being who is laced rather inextricably to this time and this place and, therefore, has a vested interest in both.

Many political leaders are denying the reality of America having borders, of capital resources being finite, of economic laws applying to  . . . well . . . the economy.

There is precious little appetite amongst most folks to even figure out if our elected officials were actually elected consistent with state and federal law.

The reality haters also hate God because they want the state to be the most powerful force in the universe.  An individual’s true connection to the infinite, to the universe or to God (the particular word doesn’t matter, in making my point) is a threat to those who want to bend reality and the truth into pretzels of illogical, unproven and toxic sociological, psychological, economic and geopolitical theories that syphon off power from people and feed that insatiable beast they call “government.”

Those who love and respect truth are left to resist the obliteration of reality by summoning facts, seeking redress in the highest courts in the land and, when possible, resisting edicts that require them to agree that the king is wearing clothes when the naked truth is quite the opposite.

The difficulty of waging a war against fiction is that it is more arduous to put forward a factual argument.  It requires data and discernment, research and responsibility.  How much freer the reality haters are to simply make things up.  After all, since their agenda is to confuse and weaken people, it makes no sense for them to remain tied to accepted rules of debate.   Why would they sweat the details and appeal to people’s ability to reason when the ability to reason is what they want to crush?

Now, here’s why the most trouble is still only brewing:  The truth always wins.  See, when the reality haters run in the direction of disinformation and destruction of facts, they are running against the tide.  And there will be hell to pay when the waves of fact come crashing down upon them (and us, since we have yielded or lost to them, in many cases).  Economic principles will reassert themselves with a vengeance.  The fact that we have lost respect for our own nation’s Constitution will make us vulnerable to our enemies.  The fact that we have lost respect for the individual and for forces far greater than the state will force us to walk through fire, in order to again find ourSELVES.

Dr. Keith Ablow

It is Mental Health Awareness Month.  That is insane.  We’re just gladhanding one another, while avoiding the real diagnosis:  We’ve been so pathetically behind bringing people up to speed on recognizing and treating scourges like depression and anxiety that there is a massive epidemic of suicide gripping the nation, while hospitals and outpatient clinics remain fractured to the point of absurdity in delivering treatments that can save lives—like IV ketamine infusions, transcranial magnetic stimulation, expert psychopharmacology and high-level psychotherapy.

The fact is that while we talk about “awareness,” any individual in the United States struggling with symptoms of mental illness should be “aware,” of this:  You will need to take immediate charge of your own treatment, in order to defeat the symptoms plaguing you.  Unless you have lots of money to spend and great motivation to find a psychiatrist worthy of spending it on, no one will serve in the role of dedicated director of the care you need.

Why?  For one thing, the number of well-trained mental health professionals—and here I mean, experts, not hacks—is woefully inadequate to meet the need.  Psychiatrists have been coerced into being “medication visit” doctors who profit from seeing 30 patients a day, 15 minutes at a time, and who routinely fail to see patients as entire people who need a comprehensive approach to healing their disorders.  The same is now true for psychiatric nurse practitioners.  That leaves the gripping, intellectually and emotionally demanding work of deciphering the psychological roots of discontent, anxiety or delusions like paranoia to psychologists (some of whom are also now empowered to prescribe medications at the drop of a hat) or mental health counselors, some of whom have no more than a high school education and a modicum of training, thereafter. 

Secondly, mental health professionals turn out to be passive go-along-to-get-alongers, not incisive self-starters.  If you don’t ask about the newest ways to treat your depression or anxiety or attention-deficit disorder, they will probably take the path of least resistance and not bring it up.  It’s less work, frankly, to refill your medicines and lend an ear to listen to your suffering, than to do what is needed to defeat that suffering.

Thirdly, mental health professionals turn out to be scared of anything new.  That’s right. Scared.  While oncologists might embrace the “right to try” law that makes experimental drugs available as a last-ditch option to cancer patients with dire prognoses, psychiatrists won’t even routinely embrace the use, for instance, of ketamine, which has proven miraculous in defeating mental illness.  They have been far too slow to lobby for the use of psilocybin, despite the fact that it can be life-saving.  And they have been too frightened to push back against the DEA on being completely free to use opiates like the pain reliever Tramadol to treat depression, even though it works in a huge percentage of cases.

Fourth, no political will really exists to change all this.  If it did, you wouldn’t have insurance companies dictating lengths of stay for patients in inpatient units (which they do) and you wouldn’t have them lobbying emergency room clinicians to send patients on the edge of life and death back home because they “contract for safety.”  Imagine how well it would go over to have insurance companies sending cardiac patients home, unless they were likely to die within the next 24 hours.  That’s what will be happening, in emergency rooms all over America today.

The truth is that America doesn’t deserve to observe a Mental Health Awareness Month because we won’t really lift a finger to save lives devastated by mental illness this month or any other month.  We could win the whole battle, but we won’t even join it.

Dr. Keith Ablow