Society as one cause of mental illness

I have been thinking about this topic a lot. I believe we are almost exclusively asked to “look within” to address our own mental distress and almost entirely ignore very real external causes. My thought is that certain politics and religions provide narratives that are counter to sane society. Politicians often blame a lack of mental health services when in fact it may be the politics itself that is to blame. Behind the politics are money that profits from things such as the opioid epidemic, predatory lending, and spending millions of dollars to NOT help people. I believe these forces may even be warping the mental health industry to sometimes blame our distress on ourselves. A big part of my mental health is learning how not to react to my stressors - about how I frame the “story” in my head. It’s very helpful to me. But it constantly buts up against a furious society that neither feels safe or supportive. My distress is not just my own to solve - by definition civilized society needs civility and without it everyone shares this dis-ease in some way. Playing the fiddle inside the burning house you live in is not sane.

I leave a quote from psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.

In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility [and] distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton"..."Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself". Source: Wikipedia