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How prevalent is the topic of mental health in America compared to Germany?
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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I got a similar impression because I listen to the rapper Juice Wrld and he basically constantly talks about the deepest mental health issues in his music.
Would you say it's more about not having enough therapists in Germany or having too many people who seek them. Cause when it comes to the amount of therapists there always have been some in the areas I lived even in small towns. The problem for me was always to get an appointment cause they already had lots of patients and requests for new patients and were overwhelmed by that.
I think it's a general issue with our healthcare system. And the lack of doctors and hospitals is more pronounced in rural areas. But basically the same thing applies in the city. And not just for mental therapy. You often also get to wait for a MRT, if there's something wrong with your foot... I'm not an expert on this. But I guess we could do way better. And I hear that a lot, that someone had to wait for therapy for relatively normal physical issues. And similar things apply to related professions. One home for the elderly next door, just closed a year ago. Not because we don't have elderly people anymore, on the contrary, there is quite some demand. But they just didn't have enough employees to do the work. And at some point they had to close. I think it's going to become a big issue unless we deal with that and find a suatainable solution.
Thr American Medical Association lobbied Congress to limit how many residency positions they open up. This artificial constraint reduces the supply of doctors so that they can keep their wallets fat.
Neither actually. The health insurances are allowed to decide amongst themselves how many therapists are covered. And this number hasn't been adjusted (much) since 1999 even though demand has skyrocketed since then.
Approximately 50% of therapists in Germany cannot accept public health insurance. Yet there is enough demand from the 10% of Germans with private health insurance ( + those who pay for therapy thenselves) to keep those therapists afloat.
In other words:
12.5% of Germans have been diagnosed with depression => 9.5 million people officially diagnosed which is certainly an underreported figure.
There are ~24,000 therapists in Germany.
As a result, there are 396 people with depression per therapist - meaning if every therapist worked 40 hours per week with 1 hour per client you'd have to wait 10 weeks between sessions.
Now add all other mental illnesses which would require therapy and you'd get an even larger number.
Sure, not everyone diagnosed with depression requires therapy. But this doesn't excuse the obvious lack of paid therapists - which is openly acknowledged by the public health insurances but they are not legally required to change anything.