And the reason for this brokenness is all too easy to identify: the very wealthy have been increasingly siphoning off all gains in productivity since the Reagan era.
Tax the rich massively, use the money to provide for everyone, without question or discrimination, and most of these issues will start to subside.
Continue to wail about how this is impossible, there's no way to make the rich pay their fair share (or, worse, there's no way the rich aren't already paying their fair share), the only thing to do is what we've already been doing, but harder, and, well, we can see the trajectory already.
It's certainly easy to blame the rich for everything, but the rich have a tendency to be miserable (the characters in "The Great Gatsby" and "Catcher in the Rye" are illustrations of this). Historically, poor places have often been happier, because of a rich web of social connection, while the rich are isolated and unhappy. [1] Money doesn't buy happiness or psychological well-being, it buys comfort.
A more trenchant analysis of the mental health problem is that the US has designed ourselves into isolation, and then the Covid lockdowns killed a lot of what was left. People need to be known and loved, and have people to love and care about, which obviously cannot happen in isolation.
[1] I am NOT saying that poor = happy, and I think the positive observations tended to be in poor countries, not tenements in London.
Tax the rich massively, use the money to provide for everyone, without question or discrimination, and most of these issues will start to subside.
Continue to wail about how this is impossible, there's no way to make the rich pay their fair share (or, worse, there's no way the rich aren't already paying their fair share), the only thing to do is what we've already been doing, but harder, and, well, we can see the trajectory already.