Jeff Minick: Learning how to avoid the mental illness of politics
May 2, 2025
Dr. Thomas Insel is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002-2015. In December 2023 he noted that since the Covid pandemic 38% more Americans were receiving some type of mental health care.
“We are facing three distinct crises, which partially overlap,” Insel contends. The first is a youth mental health crisis, the second is a crisis of serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, which particularly affects the homeless and the incarcerated, and the third is “the ongoing substance abuse disorder (SUD) or addiction crisis….”
