Vice President Kamala Harris
1 hour
The mental health of nurses, doctors, and hospital staff is deeply connected to the health and wellness of our communities. That is why our Administration has invested more than $100 million to expand mental health resources, including funding for health care organizations to create evidence-based programs around mental health and wellbeing for their employees.
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We have a huge shortage of Psychiatrists here in California, and here in Anaheim, we need to train way more Psychiatrists, we need to invest in training Psychiatrists.
We can help to train Psychiatrists in San Diego, San Diego has a great college where they train Psychiatrists.
Only if you can find people who want the job, Tony.
I think some reasons behind the shortage of Psychiatrists are the long time that it takes to train to become a Psychiatrist, and also the high cost of an education. If we made it easier to become Psychiatrists then we would have more Psychiatrists, and the best way is to remove the high cost and we can give the students a free ride through college if they become Psychiatrists and if they serve our communities.
With the Wellness Centers and with the Homeless Shelters, we can get workers by training the people after they get help. There is a famous lawyer in Southern California who is mentally ill and is on medication, and he says "Hire Big Lou, he is on meds too." People who are helped can rise to work at the Wellness Centers, and at the Homeless Shelters, etc, and some people even rise to become lawyers like Big Lou. I am sure many people who are helped can rise to become Psychiatrists if we make it possible for them.
I have a friend who is a Psychiatrist at the Mental Health Association in Santa Ana, her husband is an actor and he was in the Lion King on Broadway, she is from Vietnam, she is a great Psychiatrist and she helped me a lot when I needed help. There was a thrift store next to the MHA and she and I went to the thrift store and we helped each other pick out clothes, it was fun. She gave me a lot of good advice. We need more great Psychiatrists like her, she is wonderful, and she has been serving the community for over 20 years.
Everyone thinks that Psychiatrists make the big bucks, but we need for people to be motivated by the desire to help other people instead of being motivated by money. If we send the people to college for free, and give them a free ride, then we can give them a path where they do not need to be motivated by money.
We can also use the Entertainment Industry to show people who are working as Psychiatrists in a good light, instead of just bad people like Nurse Ratchet in "One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest" and other bad characters like that. We need to show wonderful little sexy Psychiatrists like my friend from Vietnam who works at the MHA. We need for the Entertainment Industry to show good people who are Psychiatrists.
The whole issue of Mental Health has a bad stigma, and we need to change that, Mental Illness can happen to anyone, and we need to have a better view of workers in the Mental Health Industry, and we need good guys like Big Lou to become Lawyers and to show that Mental Illness is not a life sentence.
Salute,
Tony V.
