Nicholas Rosenlicht, MD
My Brother's Keeper
Released October 1, 2024 from Pegasus Books and Simon & Schuster.
A leading psychiatrist seeks to transform our understanding of mental health
care and how it fits into larger social and economic forces—and proposes an effective and compassionate new framework for healing.
Mental health care in America has become nothing short of atrocious. Supposed developments in treatment methods and medication remain inaccessible to those who need them most. Countless people seeking treatment are routinely funneled into homelessness and prison while a mental health epidemic ravages younger generations. It seems obvious that the system is broken, but the tragic truth is that it is actually functioning exactly as intended, providing reliably enormous profits for the corporate entities who now manage mental healthcare.
In the tradition of Andrew Solomon or Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, My Brother's Keeper is a paradigm-shifting book that can help us find our way to real and lasting solutions.
Reviews
Kirkus Reviews -
"A veteran psychiatrist casts a spotlight on America’s failing mental health care system.
Rosenlicht untangles the knot that is health care in America and proposes a framework for a new system that embraces physical and mental health as one. Throughout the book, he immerses readers in today’s mental health crisis, providing shocking statistics about the nation’s homeless population, who are seen and yet go unacknowledged. “As I negotiate bodies and human feces on our downtown sidewalks, endure petty crime, and see people who cycle in and out of jail, I can only shake my head in disgust,” he writes—and his disgust is not for the hapless people roaming the streets because they don’t get the help they need. He blames the divide of physical and mental health care defined by insurance companies that focus on increased profits over improved lives. In a for-profit health care system that is ready to drop the seriously ill due to the cost of coverage, he’s not surprised that mental health care has turned into a morass of inadequate coverage, insurmountable costs, and zero follow-through for those most in need. “I’ve seen a constant rotisserie of scams, evasions, contracts, rule bending and obfuscation as health insurers avoid paying for care, pharmaceutical companies charge the most they can get away with, and healthcare systems compete for healthy and wealthy clients who need little care…all while doing everything they can to avoid the poor, and the truly sick, especially the mentally ill.” The very titles assigned to people—caregivers or doctors as “providers” and patients as “clients”—reveal that the health care system is so rooted in a business model that it seems impossible to find a way out. But Rosenlicht offers glimpses of hope, reminding readers that people continue to fight for a better system in America that encompasses all citizens, with emphasis on care, not profit.
A scathing look at a crisis that can no longer be ignored and a heartfelt call to demand change."
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