Speaker 1: The real mental health issue might actually be the Republican Party. The there is
a new piece in The New Republic by Michael Tomasky called The main mental health issue
in this country is in the Republican Party. And this piece makes a number of really good points.
One of the points that the piece makes, and I encourage you to read it, is that red states
allocate way less money for treating mental illness than do blue states. And in fact, if you
look at a map and we're putting such a map up on the screen, you can see that generally speaking,
red states are much lighter colored, meaning they devote a much smaller share of their budgets
towards mental health treatment that we know. And so at a baseline level, this is a bad start.
When you look back at the last many years, there has really only been one major expansion
of mental health spending and coverage, and it's called the Affordable Care Act,
also known as Obamacare. Remember, Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing.
I know it's wild that I have to mention that, but I do. And Republicans regularly
vote against all other attempts, as I've talked about with Greg Abbott or we will talk about with
Greg Abbott. As I talked about with Congressman Tony Gonzales, Republicans regularly vote against
attempts to increase funding and increase access to mental health treatment. So at a core level,
when we say mental health, mental illness, red states are disproportionately under-funded when
it comes to access. So it's a perfectly logical conclusion. You've got more Republicans than
Democrats in red states. Red states have lower funding for mental health treatment.
Increasingly, mental illness, you would expect, would skew towards being a Republican problem.
To be clear, it doesn't mean at all that there are millions of lefties and Democrats, etc.,
who struggle with mental illness. But when you look at access and treatment and funding,
it's going to skew as a more as a bigger problem to the right. But it's more than that. The problem
in terms of mental health isn't just health care. It's also about economic
care. We know about the crushing effect on one's mood and cognitive state and mental health status
of being unable to take time off from work. When you need it of knowing that you're going to be
able to just pay your basic bills, of feeling like there's no economic opportunity where you
are. And when you look at all of these different things, when you look at right wing economic
policy versus left wing economic policy, the economic realities of red states we know are
much more negatively impactful on mental health and and sort of the state of one's mood than those
economic policies in blue leaning states. Again, these are averages we're talking generally. Now,
there's another layer which Tomasky doesn't talk about in the piece, which I want to add,
which is when we talk about a lot of these right wing ideas, they sound almost what we might call
mentally ill. Now, I want to be really careful. We may not literally mean mentally ill in all
of these cases. We're not stigmatizing mental illness. We're also not using it as an insult.
But when you hear the idea. Give teachers guns and have them defend classrooms.
It sounds like what you would say is an insane idea. It's disconnected from reality. Only someone
who has something wrong, either significant ignorance or some kind of mental disturbance,
would suggest, because it doesn't make any sense. And we can go further. There was a recent poll.
20% or more of the Republican Party believes at least some. Q and on conspiracies. Okay.
Is it literally diagnostic mental illness? No, it's not. But a lot of this ideology borders
on people who are having some kind of block where they're not connected to the real world.
There's a delusional nature to it. After the 2020 election. 57% of Trump voters believe that Trump
won. Trump didn't win. Joe Biden won. Joe Biden easily won the popular vote. Joe Biden easily
won the electoral vote. No one state would have changed that. Of the states that were in play,
Trump didn't win. Trump lost. And yet 57% of his voters believed that he had won. At some point we
have to say, well, there's a delusional nature to it. Is it diagnostically delusional? Well,
that you'd have to examine everybody and mental health professionals would have to make the call.
But when we talk about mental health, the fact that they're saying, well, just fix guns by
dealing with you, fix shootings by dealing with mental health rather than guns. Well,
at the micro level, they vote against you doing that all the time. They don't want to fund mental
health treatment. They don't want to do any of it. But when we say it's a mental illness problem,
what are we really saying? And when you step back and look at the state of American politics and you
look at where access to mental health treatment is funded and you look at the delusional nature of a
lot of these ideas, I again, I know I always use this example. We're not talking about a difference
as to whether the top tax rate should be 20%, 35% or 50%. This is a different thing. We're talking
about something that is fundamentally delusional. And you need only look at the NRA convention. You
need only look at the so-called suggestions that they're coming up with to deal with
the gun violence issue, to see that. So I'm not diagnosing anybody. I'm not stigmatizing mental
illness and I'm not ridiculing mental illness. I'm also not using the term mental illness as a cudgel
to attack people with. But I am pointing out that when we talk about mental illness broadly,
we really have to dig in to what is happening state by state to understand the implications
of, number one, not properly funding dealing with mental health issues.
And number two, pointing to them in some vague way when we blame shootings. But then all of a sudden
we can say, Hey, half of the ideas associated with Trump ism are delusional. Colloquially.
That I'm sort of at a loss for words to go further. But I'm very curious to hear from you.
What do you think? Find me on Twitter at Pacman. And remember that Tuesday, June 14th at 6 p.m.,
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