My Brother’s Keeper: The Untold Stories Behind the Business of Mental Health―and How to Stop the Abandonment of the Mentally Ill

Summary

A leading psychiatrist seeks to transform our understanding of mental health care and how it fits into larger social and economic forces—and proposes an effective and compassionate new framework for healing.

Mental health care in America has become atrocious. Developments in treatment methods and medication are inaccessible to those who need them most. People seeking treatment are routinely funneled into homelessness and prison while a mental health epidemic ravages younger generations. It seems obvious that the system is broken, but it's functioning as intended by providing enormous profits for the corporate entities managing mental healthcare.

Most of us are more comfortable ducking our fears about mental health and placing our faith in the rugged American and the free market, rather than facing our prejudices and misguided beliefs. Why did we build such a disastrous system when every other industrialized nation have far better models? After decades of work in psychiatry, Dr. Nicholas Rosenlicht reveals how and why we arrived at this abysmal reality—and how we can find our way out of it.

Dr. Rosenlicht explains the disastrous outcomes of the for-profit mental health care model. Patients are “clients” and doctors are “providers,” stripping away the humanity and emboldening shifty ethical and legal practices. Perhaps most insidious, the business model paints the mentally ill as people who don’t want help, rather than someone who can’t afford care or even realize they need help because of their illness. Mental illness will touch all of us in some way, if not directly through those we know and love. Those who have already helped care for a loved one know that those who suffer from it have hopes, desires, and aspirations. A healthy solution means a healthier society. In the tradition of Andrew Solomon or Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, My Brother's Keeper is a paradigm-shifting book that can help us find our way to real and lasting solutions.