A Fool Crisis in America

America doesn’t have a mental health crisis. We have a fool crisis, and if people would stop acting like fools, they would stop complaining about their mental health.

Saying this out loud gets me in lots of trouble, the top reason being that a fool almost never thinks he’s a fool — it’s his last guess at why he’s in pain, and before he gets there, he has a chain of reasons as long as his arm. High up on this list of excuses, probably first, for most actual fools today, is that they’re “unwell.” The problem? Their brains. So in fact I agree with them — I just happen to view their problem from another angle.

Before explaining, I want to explain what foolish isn’t.

Foolish isn’t when your kid dies and your life turns black. Foolish isn’t being born into an abusive household and trying to recover from trauma. It also isn’t waking up one morning and realizing that your whole life is going nowhere and that you’re going to die and maybe nobody’s going to remember you in a few years. These are all great reasons to be sad, and, I would argue, if you are sad, then it’s a sign that you’re healthy. It could even be argued that if you aren’t sad when bad things happen, you’re sick. So we can cross these off the “mental health list,” and anybody who says he’s suffering mental unhealth because of them is a fool. Wrong words signify the wrong ideas, and wrong ideas are the only reason anybody can be foolish.