The American Approach To Mental Health Is Often Two-Faced

We preach “community” and “connection,” but do people really want that, or want to offer that to others?

Ted Bauer
5 min readJun 17, 2024

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I’ve written about mental health on and off for six years now, probably because I’m some small degree of crazy with various slices of problems. I also just find it hysterical that we have a relatively small country of 330 million people, with tons of money coursing through it, and we are so bad at helping people mentally.

I think I can explain a little bit of it, though. Let me quickly walk through some of the problems I’ve seen and then I’ll see if I can do anything about solutions.

The Self-Care Paradox

In the last 10 years, there’s been a big push towards “self-care,” which is nice and admittedly people do deserve that. The problem is: often, “self-care” means getting rid of anyone that makes you uncomfortable, and usually people like addicts and those struggling and those in your orbit who are depressed will make you…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.