No Panaceas in Behavioral Health

Lab Rats Living in a Cage of the mind

I wonder how many lab rats ever really figure out they are part of an experiment. Any? Probably not. Lab rats are born into a caged environment, live their entire lives inside that environment, and ultimately die there, never fathoming that just a few feet away, beyond a window or a doorway where a small glimmer of light invades their world, exists an entirely different reality never contemplated inside their experimental boundaries.

In a very real way, you and I, and practically everyone with whom we associate, are little different than lab rats. Instead of rigid metal frames for cages, however, our cages are of the mind. The environment we perceive derives from what we observe, cast against what we are told, each input source reconciled against the other by our ability to reason.

In the end, what is real becomes what we decide.

I’m old enough to recall the Hula-hoop phenomenon. All the kids had Hula-hoops. And we all had YoYo’s and Slinky’s. Slinky’s could actually walk down the stairs. Watching a Slinky walk down the stairs was what we called entertainment when I was a kid.

And in each of those patented devices, someone, an inventor, had an idea he or she thought might sell. And in each device, respectively, the inventor pursued a course of development for his product, performing the diligence necessary at the time to best understand it’s market potential, ultimately deciding whether the development, marketing and distribution of the final product might justify the cost. In the case of these kid’s toys, each turned out to be a highly-successful venture. The inventor of each took a raw idea and created a brand new market to exploit, a market which prior to all that work did not exist. Before the YoYo, a YoYo wasn’t even a thing. There was no market for a YoYo. The same can be said for the Hula-hoops and Slinkies. They weren’t things before someone went at risk to create them, produce them, market them and sell them to a market created just for them. My point is that those things weren’t things until suddenly they were things. And it was market-creation that determined whether private efforts to create those things would actually pay off.

Now, contrast the process by which these kid’s toys came into being, one in which markets materialized out of nothing, against what we see with the market for services in what has become known as the “behavioral health industry,” another market that suddenly materialized out of nothing. Fifteen years ago or so, the behavioral health industry wasn’t as thing. There was no real product called, ‘behavioral health.’ There was no market of buyers for behavioral health. But in the meantime, your state governments, all over the country, have created a product which we will simply call, ‘behavioral health,’ created a market for that product, and very importantly, have capitalized a business operating at the level of a department of state government to produce and sell that product, using taxpayer funds paid to 3rd party providers to convey that product to a market that would receive it with little or no cost to the end-user.

To the people creating the behavioral health services market, all of us are simple lab rats. All we know is what we see about what they are doing and what they tell us. We have to reconcile the differences using human reason. If we do not see the experiment coming our way, we can easily get caught up in it.

So what do we mean by, “behavioral health?” Today’s definition for behavioral health might be thought of as, the scientific study of the emotions, behaviors and biology relating to a person’s mental well-being, their ability to function in every day life and their concept of self. Behavioral health concerns stress, depression, anxiety, relationship problems, grief, addiction, ADHD or learning disabilities, mood disorders, or other psychological concerns. As opposed to “mental health,” which only encompasses the biological component of this aspect of wellness, the term, “behavioral health” encompasses all contributions to mental wellness including substances and their abuse, behavior, habits, and other external forces.”

Got it?

So what we have here is a highly subjective, all-encompassing list of human frailties, which many or most people experience at one time or another, creating a vast umbrella of concerns the government says it wants to spend tax money with 3rd parties to help us recover from. At least that is what ‘behavioral health’ means to a lab rat who actually realizes he’s part of an experiment. On the other hand, to a lab rat whose mind is stuck in a cage, a rat who sincerely believes everything I describe is the stuff real life is made of, that lab rat thinks he’s sick and needs the government to spend some of that money to help him. He remembers being in a bad mood. He remembers being depressed, remembers a girl friend who left him, remembers being anxious before a test. He remembers the grief when his dog died. He remembers having trouble concentrating in math class. And, of course, people have been mean or judgmental to him, making him feel bad from time to time. So, by definition, because he still hasn’t figured out he’s a lab rat in an experiment, our rat friend determines he’s got big problems. He’s suffering from a lack of, “behavioral health.”

And there are those among us who by their own choices become addicted to drugs, oops, I meant, “substances.” They no longer need to go to drug abuse clinics. Their diagnosis is now termed a ‘behavioral disorder.’ They don’t need treatment for drug abuse, they just need to learn new, better behavior.

And this behavioral health diagnosis seems only prevalent in America. In fact, a recent poll of Ukrainians dodging Russian drone attacks on the western outskirts of Bakhmut conclusively demonstrates that individuals who have real problems rarely exhibit behavioral health symptoms. The money being made, therefore, in Ukraine is more by weapons manufacturers and money launderers, not behavioral health specialists. (Yes, that was a joke.)

But, thankfully, in America, the land of opportunity, the behavioral health business is booming! For a market that hardly existed 15 years ago, unlike the private investments to create markets for Hula-hoops, YoYo’s and Slinky’s, your government has been investing your tax dollars to create gigantic markets for pharmaceutical companies, counseling and monitoring companies, for them to receive unlimited, perpetual profits. Perhaps only by the hand of fate, have these companies wandered into the right place, at the right time for laws to be written and contracts signed, all ostensibly intended to raise the level of everyone’s behavioral health.

Fortune Business Insights speaks to the burgeoning market for behavioral health services across America:

“The U.S. behavioral health market is projected to grow from $79.69 billion in 2022 to $105.14 billion by 2029…The growth in the number of people suffering from mental health disorders lead to the US behavioral health market growth at a remarkable rate…The US market is expected to grow to new heights during the forecast period.”

That’s great news!! Why, if you have kids graduating from college soon, they might payoff their six-figure student loans faster if they get on with the government in one of those high-paying, 3rd party behavioral health jobs. The best news is they won’t have to do much, artificial intelligence yielding proprietary predictive analytics doing all the hard work of restricting the freedom of human beings unfortunate enough to find themselves caught up in a dragnet of private, biometric monitoring systems paid by the taxpayers.

In our state, the government entity in charge of creating the market for behavioral health services rendered by interested third parties soaking Georgia taxpayers is the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD). To kick off the marketing effort, this September the DBHDD will partner with THE CLINTON FOUNDATION and the Georgia Council for Recovery in a 43 city bus tour. The tour will recruit lab rats for a statewide experiment to help them all recover from normal human weaknesses. And because just about everybody has them, the market for taxpayer-funded 3rd party behavioral health services is wide open!

When I was a kid, my parents taught that we are known by the company we keep. In this case, the Georgia DBHDD keeps company with the Clinton Foundation. That tells you not only where this entire program comes from, but also tells you how the Government of Georgia has been taken over by globalist operatives. These operatives (Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, DBHDD Commissioner Kevin Tanner) hid their true intentions until they were either elected or appointed to positions of power in state government, at which time they began initiating program after program, in which private interested 3rd parties become the beneficiaries of tax incentives or massive state contracts, using grants and taxpayer funds to pay the costs.

The Chief spokesman for the Georgia Council for Recovery, and primary advocate at state government is a former, self-described, crack addict, who was arrested in 2016 during an apparent drug deal, in which he allegedly told the police, “theoretically speaking” if he bought crack, it would be from the man in the room. He also allegedly asked the officer if he could “make this go away,” telling him if he needed anything from him, he would do it. That sounded like a bribe attempt to me.

But these days, of course a man is no longer accountable for his actions. These days, a personal decision to take addictive recreational drugs is simply a behavioral health abnormality, as if it were something that happened to him outside of his control.

So this Fall, when you hear the whistle stop call of the Georgia behavioral health tour bus roll into your town, which lab rat are you going to be? One who sees what’s going on and decides to deal with normal life problems on your own terms, or will you decide to enroll in a government program to let people whom Georgia taxpayers pay a lot of money help you “recover” from whatever you think your problem is? It’s up to you.

There are many people among us who need help. And the GCR chief spokesman would be among them. But throwing massive amounts of taxpayer dollars toward favored 3rd party service providers is not how you do it. Placing practically every human weakness under an umbrella of conditions requiring treatment under a massive government program is not how you do it. Paying to electronically monitor individuals enrolled in a behavioral health system is not how you do it. Embarking on a statewide bus tour to recruit people into the system is certainly not how you do it. Instead, a better idea would be to deal with the problem as it walks in the door and asks for help. When that happens, that is when you have an individual who is ready to accept it. That’s really all you can do. There are no panaceas here.