Human unhappiness comes from the environment, the interactions, the workplaces,
the society, all the social influences and economic influences in people's lives
with a rapacious capitalist system that sees you as nothing but a cipher in a ledger,
that during a pandemic calls you essential and then after the pandemic says, 'You're
unskilled. You're worth very little.' And tries to profit from giving you a low salary
and poor working conditions. Women are the most prone to take psych meds.
They admit their unhappiness more, readily ask for help and often
get unfairly medicated. Women are also the poorest paid people in the United States.
The majority of Black women in the United States make either 15 or less
as a wage. All women together: 40% of American women, all women together, make 15 dollars or less
an hour. And many of them are single mothers living on poverty wages. That's
why there isn't a city, state, or county in this entire United States
where two people working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
So, we're talking about people living lives that economically are immiserated and have
all sorts of psychological problems on trying to make ends meet, trying to get their kids
to have the commodities that they see on TV that other kids have,
trying to feel at ease, trying not to worry about bills piling up, including medical bills,
which are one of the reasons for bankruptcy in the United States (one of the top reasons).
Elizabeth Warren and her daughter wrote a very good book on the causes of bankruptcy,
and the top four included medical bills. Well, looking at the effect
of human misery that comes from the society.
It isn't a brain disease. It comes from unhappy lives, unhappy families, and unhappy adolescents,
unhappy college years or young adulthood, and unhappy middle age and old age.
Ascribing those things to disease is very convenient if you don't want to help people,
if you don't want to recognize that the capitalist society we live in has a lot to do with people's
unhappiness. And it's no accident that it's women who are prescribed the most psych drugs,
because it's women who are the poorest people in the society. Not that men get off that easily.
Men have a greater rate of suicide and homicide and jailing and other
very unpleasant experiences in the society. But, I think it's very important for us to look at 'Okay,
let's look at human misery here, and what we can do about it.' And here Democracy
at Work has a lot of wonderful insights and publications. Go to www.democracyatwork.info,
and look at all the things that are there if you want to explore this. But what I'd like to do now
is to talk about 'Okay. We're doing the wrong thing here in the United States, and if we need
connection, which we sure do, and if we want to improve our status among nations
with happy people without misery, we need to go towards socialist societies.
The societies that are happiest are more socialist. We need collective
quality facilities here where people could connect and where children could connect
in a safe environment. And what we need for mental health is connection with each other:
a sense of being people together, not people who are trying to make a buck off each other,
or people who are seen as just vehicles for someone else's profit.