Dear Dr. Phil, Don’t Bloviate. Innovate!

COVID-19 crisis shows it’s time for mental health stigmas to end

Dr. Phil, I want to tell you about all the amazing technology in my car. It has adjustable shoulder seat belts in every seat, including that middle seat in the back. Every new vehicle was required by law to have seat belts for every seat in 1968.

That regulation and the resulting car maker innovations resulted in a downward trend in accident fatality per capita and per mile driven that continues today.

My car is equipped with so much more than just seatbelts. It has driver and passenger front, head, and side airbags. It has adaptive cruise control that adjusts speed according to traffic. It warms me if I wander across lanes, and my mirror blinks when a car is in my blind spot.

My car can parallel park itself and the other day when another car came around the corner behind me, my car detected a potential collision and engaged the emergency brake. The sudden stop was disorienting, but I avoided a fender bender.

Dr. Phil, I could go on about all these innovative safety features of my car, but that’s not why I am writing this open letter to you.

I am writing first to say I agree with you. Yes, COVID19, social distancing, and shelter-in-place orders are taxing on mental health. And as you pointed out on Laura Ingraham’s show last week, these measures are revealing the weakness in the American mental healthcare system.

But, I am also writing this to say stop bloviating and start innovating.

Identify the problem

You started with statistics about how many people die in car accidents, from smoking cigarettes and by drowning in swimming pools. Disregarding that your swimming pool stat as off by orders of magnitude, people are continually innovating to improve these statistics, hence my excitement about all my car’s safety features. If technological innovation and regulatory progress on vehicle design and safety halted in the 1950s, millions of people might die in car accidents each year.

Dr. Phil, you finally got to some relevant statistics about mental health later in the segment. According to you, loneliness increases the risk of coronary artery disease, stroke, and dementia — all very real physical manifestations of loneliness.

And, those risks existed before COVID-19.

The National Alliance on Mental Health reports, 1 in 5 Americans suffer from an anxiety disorder, and only 43% of those with a mental health disorder receive treatment. In 2017, 47,173 people died from suicide, a number that outstrips the average 3,536 people who drown in swimming pools.

And although they use mental health as an anti-gun-control argument, even the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, calls the state of mental healthcare a crisis in America. They point out that hospital beds for psychiatric patients decreased by 95% since the 1950s.

The stigma surrounding a mental health diagnosis further exacerbates the systemic problems addressing mental health issues. Mental health issues are often perceived as character weaknesses. Employers and peers may judge or discriminate against people with mental health problems. People avoid treatment out of shame and embarrassment.

Heck, Dr. Phil, even during this segment, you made an off-hand comment about “grown men in tears.” You seemed to indicate a man crying was an embarrassment and not just a normal response to stressful times. And yes, these are stressful times, and it is okay to cry. Furthermore, it is okay to seek mental health counseling to help.

Offer Solutions

Then, you told Ingraham that people would feel better, and a new mental health crisis would be averted if people could just go back to work. Did it cross your mind to suggest that people should reach out to a mental health provider? Perhaps you could have offered some resources like one of the many online mental health options available today.

And since one of your premises during this segment was that poverty and loss of income would play a key role in mental health problems, maybe you could have offered resources for how low-income individuals can seek mental health support.

You are right, Dr. Phil. The shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 will exacerbate the already existing mental health crisis in America. But, calling for a return to work is nothing more than a calling for a return to the status quo.

Domestic Violence

Although I wanted the open letter to stick with the mental health parts of your interview, Dr. Phil, I was haunted by how the segment ended.

Ingraham casually mentioned the uptick in domestic abuse and childhood abuse. At that moment, Dr. Phil, you folded your hands on the desk and shook your head. You seemed saddened by the implication that the shelter-in-place orders have trapped some people with their abusers.

Then, the segment abruptly ended.

I am afraid your return to work idea is not going to fix America’s domestic abuse problem, and your sorrowful look did nothing to provide comfort or aid to people stuck in a bad situation.

One-in-three women and one-in-ten men are exposed to domestic violence annually. Domestic violence kills more than 15,000 every year. These numbers are horrifying and terrifying, and yeah, COVID-19 is making them all the worse.

But here’s the reality, domestic violence was under-reported long before COVID-19 and the abused have long been afraid of coming forward.

The casual dismissiveness of this at the end of the segment burned me. Domestic violence is personal to me because I speak from experience.

My mother stayed with my father for 26 years. He physically and mentally abused her, my siblings, and me until she left him. Memories of him pointing guns as us and threatening our lives haunt me. After she left him, she and my sister lived in a battered women’s shelter for weeks where they had property stolen, and someone tried to coerce my sister into prostitution.

My father stalked my mother, hopped an 8-foot wrought iron fence, and tried dragging her out of a parking lot by her hair and arms. If not for my sister and a security guard, my mother would be another domestic violence death statistics.

Over those years, teachers, neighbors, and family ignored the violence in our home. Reports were filed with school counselors and never followed up. And when my father severely beat me as a teen. Although I had a black eye, bloody nose, and was covered in my blood, the police wrote him a misdemeanor assault ticket and told me to go home. Our family felt trapped, and I can relate to how people living in with an abuser right now must feel.

Here are some ideas for how you could have offered some help and hope to people trapped in a bad situation. First, you could have talked about what needs to be done to help end domestic violence, including strengthening laws, improving safety nets for people who leave their abuser, and reducing the barriers victims face.

I know that would be a hard thing to approach considering the host you are talking to disparages women who speak out about the sexual assault. But calling her out on this might be a starting point for giving victims of abuse hope.

Next, there is the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Would it be so hard to ask for that number to be shown on a chyron?

Finally, you could have offered some resources that help people leave their abusers. These resources are great for people trapped with their abusers and for people wanting to help. Here are domestic violence shelters right near your Beverly Hills home. Perhaps you can stop in and offer some counseling to survivors who are not only facing the loss of home but this deadly virus as well.

Here’s the thing Dr. Phil, you know domestic violence is an insidious problem. You and your wife created the When Georgia Smiles Foundation specifically to address domestic violence problems. Yet, you sat there on Ingraham’s and pushed a “go back to work” narrative to support political theater without ever offering help to those trapped.

Imagine the possibilities

Ultimately, Dr. Phil, the problem with the segment lies in its missed opportunity. Rather than rattling off a bunch of statistics and making a call to return to the same broken systems that existed before COVID-19, you could have talked about real forward-thinking solutions.

Within days of Massachusetts calling a state of emergency, my mental health provider, Column Health, converted me to telehealth.

Column Health also provides addiction counseling and group therapy and they immediately went to work, moving all their services online so they could ensure their clients received the support they needed without interruption. And they are taking on new clients.

Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous moved online as well.

It took a nationwide emergency to force the sudden adoption of this technology.

Around the same time, my neighborhood community center transitioned from an in-person meeting space to an online meeting space. They created weekly Zoom calls with seniors so they could check-in and connect. When some neighborhood seniors were having problems connecting, they helped them get the resources they need.

The community center hosted community check-ins, set up food collection boxes, and helped erect mini-pantries throughout the city. Rather than lamenting social distancing, this organization completely changed the way they connected with the community and made sure people were supported.

Those are two very personal things happening right in my backyard, but everywhere I look, I see innovative solutions. Fitness instructors are creating videos and streaming live classes. Restaurants and stores hosting live online courses where all you do is pick up the order ahead of time then log on and join the class. You can participate in sessions from around the globe.

I know these things are not accessible to everyone. It is a privilege to take advantage of them, and they are not going to make up for the decimation of the economy. They are not a panacea for mental health crises arising from the shelter-in-place orders. And they sure as shit aren’t going to free people from their domestic abusers, but they are examples of people innovating and working on changing the existing paradigms.

Imagine if rather than saying we must return to the existing broken mental health system, we took this time to change the way we think about mental health. Imagine if we acknowledged people are hurting and told them, “It’s okay to hurt. That is human.”

People have lost their fucking jobs, lost their social outlets, lost savings accounts, and livelihood. They lost their identities and connection to humanity. It is alright for a grown man to cry over that, but what if people knew know there is nothing wrong with those feelings? And what if they knew there was nothing wrong with asking for help?

Imagine if we propped up the mental health system now, and rather than only 43% of people getting treatment, 100% of people got treatment.

Dr. Phil, imagine coming out of this crisis where mental health issues aren’t stigmatizing, where people suffering from domestic violence didn’t feel afraid of ending up back with their abuser or stalked or killed.

Kimi is a recovering corporate engineer figuring out what’s next. She is a Boston area freelance writer with work featured in HerStry, For Women Who Roar, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, The MOON Magazine, Backroads, and Culture. Follow her at NoReturnTicket.kceridon.com or as [at]WordsbyKimi on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.