Open letter to the Democratic Socialists of America of "mental health" policy

Since recently joining the DSA, one thing I could not fail to notice is the inadequacy of your positions on Healthcare, which affects -- and limits the political utility of -- your Healthcare campaign.  This is that you do not acknowledge at all well how much the system of "mental health care" is fully capitalist.  We don't just need more of some of it, we need much less of some of what is done, and very different things across the board.  

This makes mental health care a very different kind of problem than health care generally.  It is possible to say that we just need more oncological, gynecological, or whatever kind of medical care services of good quality for everyone including the working class and poor.  But with psychiatry the profile is different.  And you (or we, the DSA) so far does not recognize this in any of its policy or issue statements at all.  

It is also linked very much to the police issue.  We cannot end policing and prisons as we know them without also totally transforming mental health care so that it is only medicine or useful care and not policing, which today is what it mainly is.  How can this have been overlooked?  And is it not extremely timely right now to start making an issue of this?  

Can I help in this regard?  Can a discussion and debate be opened about this?  I would be happy if you pointed me in the direction here, because I am a new member still learning his way around the socialist activist terrain.  Otherwise, I will keep looking, and maybe partly for other people to, or places at, which to say this.     

I am a writer and I write about this, among other things.  In brief, just for now:  

It is intrinsically biased against the poor, and it is entirely a system of both social control and huge exploitation.  It is class-based in that it is used to keep people whose role in the category of labor power that most of us count as, if and when we do, under control in their "dysfunctional" behaviors and attitudes, and responsible individually for this.  It uses a combination of talk therapies that are entirely oriented to social conformity and self-management, pharmacological treatments that are designed only to control symptoms while the person remains officially classified as mentally ill by virtue largely of heredity, regular visits to doctors who, especially with the poor, are not very different from parole or probation officers with medical degrees seeking to document information which is one-sided (what they do and say is never recorded), prejudicial against the person, and with conversations that are all about making sure the person behaves ''compliantly"; and finally, with threats of punishment through a form of imprisonment that differs only in form and degree from prisons and jails, and these places of usually involuntary detention do not help people and are not designed to, but are places of warehousing and punitive deprivation of the contents and character of the person's normal life.  In fact, the system really understands "mental illness" as disposition for either crime itself (since disobedience, disagreement, and disaffection are considered 'violence') or for attitudes and behaviors that are dysfunctional for capitalist labor and consumer/debtor activities that people who do this work often find boring or dissatisfying, but that the system needs people to do, while keeping their horizons limited as to what they can hope or want to do.  Furthermore, I know from personal experience that the hospital system in particular is used sometimes directly by the police as a form of harassment.  

But, like Bernie Sanders, the DSA still does not have much to say about all this, and it does not oppose it.  All that has been said is that we need more of (presumably the same kind of) mental health care.  Sanders even says in the very brief discussion of this in one of his campaign books, that we need more hospitalization and treatments for supposedly "mentally ill" people because many of them commit crimes!  This actualty is not true, but the belief that it is structures the system.  

Ultimalely, if we ignore these issues, or assume wrongly that they will resolve themselves "when we have socialism" as a matter of course, they will be taken up only by the liberal right.