Speaking as a person who once suffered from extreme mental illness (see my other post in this thread), mental health treatment saved my life. Full stop. If not

Speaking as a person who once suffered from extreme mental illness (see my other post in this thread), mental health treatment saved my life. Full stop. If not for the very, very persistent efforts of a psychiatrist and a therapist both, there's no way I would ever have been able to sort myself out. Mental health care is hard because people are complicated. It's been almost seven years since the woman who saved my life sat with me in her office for no less than four hours telling me that yes, I should really take these pills, and I am still sorting things out to some extent. SSRIs don't work for me. But one of them worked for a short time, and that short time was enough to completely change my understanding of myself. It changed me from thinking of myself as a terrible person who deserved all the considerable suffering I was enduring at the time, to thinking of myself as someone who was very very very sick and needed help to survive. If you've never been severely depressed, it's hard to explain what a revelation that is. I broke down sobbing for hours at the feeling of understanding for the first time that my suffering wasn't my fault. It was (in part) due to my actions, but my actions were due to my mental state, and my mental state was not something I had gotten to choose. So when I say that I strongly, strongly, with all my heart, recommend that you try them if you're depressed even though they only worked for me for a couple of days - well, that should tell you just how important that was to me. Therapy didn't fix me. But it did give me the tools to work on myself, in fits and starts, for what is now half my adult life. Having someone I spoke to every week, who understood the patterns of mental illness, helping me to see the feedback loops for what they were, was critical in understanding the nature of how I was sick. That didn't make those loops go away. But it did train me to listen to them less, and helped me know where to find them when I had the mental energy to work on them. Without mental health care, I would be dead. With mental health care, I've shed my constant fear of the smallest changes, I no longer scream at myself for the smallest mistakes, I've had healthy romantic relationships, I have a career most people would envy, I take care of my personal environment, I'm in the best physical health of my life and have shed 40% of my body weight to be not-obese for the first time since childhood, and I smile. I smile a lot. Has society failed many people? Yes. Environmental factors are relevant to mental health. In fact, it's part of why mental health is so dangerous: once your health deteriorates and you lose control and maintenance of your environment, you create a feedback loop that worsens mental illness. I am by no means arguing that we could not take care of people far better than we are. But I, at least, believe in the importance of mental health care as strongly as I believe in anything else on this Earth, because of what it did for me.