Both medicalization and psychologization can misdirect funding resources, resulting in healthcare inequities and injustices that befall people with historically psychologized, misunderstood health conditions. This mission is focused on health conditions that disproportionately afflict a segment of the unhoused community and justice-involved persons. Health conditions that exclusively afflict women have also been psychologized historically.
Brain Health Equity & Justice Project is a fiscally sponsored initiative that aims to raise awareness about these health conditions through media channels and conversations with academics and clinicians in neuroscience, the advocacy community, and professionals in general medicine, the law, social services and the advocacy community.
It is important that philanthropic entities have insight into the expansive way in which the term ‘mental health’ has increasingly been used over the past decade when defining their focus and program areas. This project does not address the popular culture concept of mental health.
Today, there’s a well-worn phrase that ‘the system is broken’. The first cracks appeared in the late 1800s as the fissure between neurology and psychiatry began to form. Before the divergence, they were not distinct disciplines. Neurology needs to come to the forefront and see behavioral health conditions as very much within its domain. Until that fissure heals, and public policies are informed by broad understanding of the essential nature of this class of illness, the advocacy community will continue to run in place, failing to fulfill the missions of the philanthropic community. Any initiative that promises to funders that its model can break the cycle that begins and ends in crisis and tragedy, but does not seek to grapple with the foundational issues that created that system…will be unsuccessful.
What is Mental Health?
“Mental Health” is a metaphor, in the same way that we refer to the financial health of a business. For historical reasons reaching back over a century and contemporary popular culture movements that sought to use less stigmatizing language in societal conversations in reference to conditions known as ‘mental illness’, there has been a cultivated use of the term ‘mental health’. It’s a term that seems to make perfect sense: There’s a health condition and it involves the mind. However, we might call ‘mental health’ a problematic metaphor when we juxtapose someone with a perfectly health brain struggling to cope with a job loss, or difficult financial circumstances, or an unhealthy relationship vs someone with a devastating neurological brain syndrome that causes grave disability leading to homelessness and incarceration.
What is a ‘Mental Illness’?
The term ‘mental illness’ is also a metaphor, and because of this, a cohort of the advocacy community disfavors its usage to describe the neurological brain health conditions that disproportionately afflict unhoused and unjustly incarcerated persons. These brain health disorders are poorly understood by the vast majority of people, which becomes a driver of harmful public policies.
Reform of public policies requires a decreasing tolerance for inequities and injustices within the general public. That goal can only be achieved by raising awareness. That’s what this project aims to achieve.
