Title: Is the Mental Health System “Broken”? | Psychology Today
Headings: Is the Mental Health System “Broken”?
Philip Yanos Ph.D.
Is the Mental Health System “Broken”?
The oft-repeated phrase is seldom questioned.

Content: Related to endorsement of this statement are beliefs that mental health service providers fail in their responsibility to prevent mass shootings ( endorsed by nearly half of Americans ), that homelessness is caused by deinstutionalization, and that community mental health systems abandon people released from psychiatric hospitals with no aftercare follow-up. The New York Times, speaking from its editorial page platform this past June, went so far as to proclaim that no one disagrees that the current community-based mental health system is a “colossal failure” (with the recommendation that more people with mental illnesses need to be permanently confined in institutions). When phrases are repeated so frequently, they can become part of the “ conventional wisdom ,” defined as “generally accepted belief, opinion, judgment, or prediction about a particular matter.” The conventional wisdom is a potentially powerful tool for influencing social behavior, and can thus be a force for good or ill, depending on how closely it aligns with scientific evidence. Researcher and sociologist Bruce Link has discussed the need for researchers to communicate scientific findings in order to turn “social misunderstanding” in the general public into “social understanding.” As an example, he discussed how the conventional wisdom in the United States used to be that smoking cigarettes posed no health risks, despite evidence to the contrary (in 1954, only roughly 40% of persons with a high school education believed that smoking caused lung cancer); however, as a steady stream of evidence from the research community began to reach the public’s awareness, this gradually changed, such that, by 1999 over 90% of US residents with a high school education endorsed that smoking causes lung cancer (greater than the proportion believing that the Earth revolves around the Sun!). Link pointed out that the transformation of the “conventional wisdom” in this regard has been associated with corresponding dramatic reductions in smoking behavior and increases in life expectancy in the US general public. Is the conventional wisdom that “the mental health system is broken” accurate and helpful? Taking a closer look at the phrase, implicit in it is the assumption that the mental health system was once whole.