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Comment by intralizee | Hacker News Reader

I disagree from personal experience. Location of where you are in the US matters. I'm in Montreal right now and the mental healthcare here is superior than what I experienced in the US in Michigan (majority of my life). I would even go as far to write the mental healthcare in USA, which I received ruined my life. If only I had the pleasure of what is available in Canada for my whole life.

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The further toward the poles you go, the more mental healthcare is needed, so it makes sense they would have the experience and infrastructure! (Completely serious.)

This isn't necessarily the case with my situation. There was only one hospital for where I lived in Marquette, Michigan. My mental healthcare was pertaining to gender dysphoria and not depression which I think you're associating with longer winters. Anyway place I grew up was filled with religious nuts to make things short. They forcibly prescribed me with antipsychotics while ignoring my right & modern medical approach of gender dysphoria. Montreal is a large city compared to that place and is progressive like California. So basically where you're located when it comes to social structure is huge.

I think small rural town versus major metro center has more to do with the quality than US vs Canada.

It’s no different in Canada - small towns don’t offer as good of care particularly when it’s something that’s not common.

I think I might have heard this at some point in the past.

Anyway, I found a reference to support your claim:

Also consistent with the conclusions of Torrey1 and Saha et al,2 our analyses shown in table 3 found a strong tendency for prevalence to increase with latitude.[1]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669590/

I'm not aware from the article of how the illness "schizophrenia" foreshadows all of mental health. My illness being Gender Dysphoria.

Vitamin D deficiency from what I've read is common everywhere. It does make sense that longer winters would impact a person such as staying inside more. Yet I doubt any evidence can confirm lack of Vitamin D is associated with the illness schizophrenia.

Ah, yeah, that's a good point. Schizophrenia is probably a poor proxy for all mental illness.

And there's probably at least quite a few things that aren't mental illness that benefit from mental healthcare.

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