Deconstructing the mental health crisis in only 2 pieces.

In their editorial in this issue of JPN, Merali and Anisman1 proposed a deconstruction of the mental health crisis in “5 uneasy pieces.” While a crisis may exist, there may be di­ vergence on how to define this crisis, how it can be decon­ structed and how we can move beyond it. First, from Merali and Anisman’s use of the term “treat­ ment” almost always being synonymous with pharmaco­ logical treatment, their quasi­silence on nonpharmacological treatments and from the type of research they are promoting, it can be deduced that the crisis the authors described is mainly one of biological psychiatry. Second, there is certainly a crisis in mental health, which encompasses more than bio­ logical psychiatry, but I believe that the nature of the 2 crises and the responses that they require may be very different and probably at times antagonistic. So I propose to decon­ struct the crisis into 2 pieces: biological psychiatry and men­ tal health.