Penn and other colleges need more readily available mental health services
Unfortunately, that's actually kind of a bandaid approach. It's a little like saying "We don't really need to make the factory safer so fewer people get hurt. We just need another doctor in our on-site clinic and it should be a free visit if the injury occurred on the job."
You go to a mental health professional because something is wrong. Often, that something wrong is social/environmental.
This trope that depressed people just need better access to mental health professionals is a left-handed way of blaming those individuals and suggesting they are simply randomly defective and washing our hands of trying to make a better world. In most cases, they are more rightly viewed as "the presenting problem" -- the signifier of something systemic gone wrong.
Family counselors are routinely presented with a situation where, for example, a teenager is acting out and being labeled as The Problem. They never accept that as the actual truth. They know that they need to deal with the family dynamic. Simply blaming the teen as the easy out will not go good places.
Unfortunately, that's actually kind of a bandaid approach. It's a little like saying "We don't really need to make the factory safer so fewer people get hurt. We just need another doctor in our on-site clinic and it should be a free visit if the injury occurred on the job."
You go to a mental health professional because something is wrong. Often, that something wrong is social/environmental.
This trope that depressed people just need better access to mental health professionals is a left-handed way of blaming those individuals and suggesting they are simply randomly defective and washing our hands of trying to make a better world. In most cases, they are more rightly viewed as "the presenting problem" -- the signifier of something systemic gone wrong.
Family counselors are routinely presented with a situation where, for example, a teenager is acting out and being labeled as The Problem. They never accept that as the actual truth. They know that they need to deal with the family dynamic. Simply blaming the teen as the easy out will not go good places.