Asklemmy

It's a much deeper rabbit hole that I can't fully explain and I'm someone who went without menal health treatment for most of my life and I should have been treated in my childhood and wasn't. Up until recently there was a stigma attached to mental illness. Probably because you until the 80s you could get thrown into an assilym and given a labotomy or worse. Lately mental healthcare has become something of a fad. And everybody is trying to see doctors. Mental health physicians are few and far between. Even with health insurance it can be difficult to find one. Some places have appointments booked solid for six months or more. It is expensive. It's roughly $200 (before insurance) to see a psychiatrist for ten minutes just to get a prescription refilled. The deductible you pay with insurance varies, but can still be over $50 or more. You can go to a private practice doctor, but they likely don't deal with insurance. Prescriptions are generally pretty cheap, even without insurance, it depends on which pharmacy you go to. Going to a regular doctor for mental healthcare is generally a bad idea because they don't understand how to diagnose people properly. Giving someone with bipolar disorder an SSRI is like throwing gas on the fire.

Local jails are full of people with undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorders. It would be much cheaper to just give people free healthcare, but there's a lot of mean spirited people in the u.s. also due to mental health issues, no doubt.