Dealing with my own mental health issues has convinced me of just how much unhappiness it causes and just how complicated it can be to address. It’s not appealing like the ~$3,500 to AMF = 1 counterfactual life equation is. I think the feeling that there aren’t good intervention options is the reason that mental health doesn’t rank higher as a cause in EA, at least not for donating, rather than longtermism vs. presentism. I’m kind of presentist, and personally I think mental health is up there for most important cause, but I have just never been confident enough in a mental health charity to donate to it. (I’m checking out StrongMinds, though—thanks for the suggestion.) I would donate to the CBT apps, if they were charities. They are the only intervention that is scalable and tractable enough in this space to really count for EA, imo. Or if someone started a campaign to add trace Lithium to the water, I would help. Other than that, I think we just need to develop more scalable interventions, which is not exactly tractable!
I would love to see EA take on the challenge of incubating mental health charities and vaunt mental health as a cause more. Thanks for your role in promoting it :)
Dealing with my own mental health issues has convinced me of just how much unhappiness it causes and just how complicated it can be to address. It’s not appealing like the ~$3,500 to AMF = 1 counterfactual life equation is. I think the feeling that there aren’t good intervention options is the reason that mental health doesn’t rank higher as a cause in EA, at least not for donating, rather than longtermism vs. presentism. I’m kind of presentist, and personally I think mental health is up there for most important cause, but I have just never been confident enough in a mental health charity to donate to it. (I’m checking out StrongMinds, though—thanks for the suggestion.) I would donate to the CBT apps, if they were charities. They are the only intervention that is scalable and tractable enough in this space to really count for EA, imo. Or if someone started a campaign to add trace Lithium to the water, I would help. Other than that, I think we just need to develop more scalable interventions, which is not exactly tractable!
I would love to see EA take on the challenge of incubating mental health charities and vaunt mental health as a cause more. Thanks for your role in promoting it :)