A “Modest Proposal” Reply to Susan C. and Rob

 

Susan C. and Rob went to the Meet and Greet session of Indiana’s General Assembly, where they earnestly urged lawmakers to fund mental health services, and which they wrote about in the March 2023 issue of the Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  (Circle City Clubhouse is a “mental health recovery” program, in my opinion not a very good one, of which I am also a member, although certainly not an active one.  However, I have previously published seven articles in the Newsletter, the most to date by any bylined author.)  Given the very poor state of mental health services in Indiana, and a foreboding sense that funding such uncritically would be pouring money down a rathole, I wrote this satirical reply to Susan C. and Rob along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s noted “A Modest Proposal,” which I also submitted for publication in the April 2023 issue of the Newsletter.  Publication of my reply, however, was declined there on the grounds that it would be “discouraging.”—GF.

 

English satirist Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame) wrote his very noted “A Modest Proposal” in response to the problem of Irish poverty.  Ireland was then a British colony, and the British were fretting about what to do about massive poverty there.  It was also a “can-do” time, this 18^th Century, full of all kinds of cockamamie schemes for “uplifting” the poor—so Swift suggested one of his own in “A Modest Proposal”:  sell the Irish children to the British rich as food!  In that spirit, I’d like to suggest my own “Modest Proposal” to Susan C. and Rob in the March 2023 Circle City Clubhouse Newsletter.  They called on the Indiana state legislature to fund mental health treatment here, but I say “No!  That’s just pouring money down a rathole.”  I say instead, “Defund mental health care in Indiana, because mental health care here is so very poor, so downright crappy!” Indiana NAMI ranks Indiana as 45^th out of the 51 states plus D.C. in quality of mental health treatment.  Other indices also place Indiana in the bottom 10 of the states in terms of quality and access to mental health care.  So why should we, the taxpayers, pay for mental health “treatment” that is mediocre and worse?  Why should we, the taxpayers, pay the salaries of “mental health professionals” who are abysmal, who are just deadwood who need to be bagging groceries or driving trucks?  Why should we, the taxpayers, pay for “mental health treatment” the patients just don’t even receive, because what they do receive is so bad, so terribly inadequate?   Why, why, why?   So, I say, “Defund the whole bad lot!”  That’s my “Modest Proposal.”