Checkups

I had a random thought during a conversation with my friends today, and thought I'd see what some other people thought of it.

So we were talking about something - I won't say what 'cause it could start an argument that's completely unrelated to the thought - and I brought up that the problem we were talking about seemed like more of a problem with a handful of people and that politicians and the media ignored these people in particular and generalized it to everyone ever. The conversation shifted away quickly after that, but my mind kept working on it. I was thinking that if these people could be found, they could be given the help they needed and wouldn't contribute to the problem anymore. The problem I was running into was that the only ways I could think of finding these people would require large scale breaches of privacy and was extremely authoritarian. Then my brain found a solution that seemed so simple, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it earlier. The answer itself quickly separated from the original problem and felt so generally beneficial to me that it seemed to beg the question: "Why isn't this the case already?"

While home for break, I had my checkups with my doctor and my dentist that I have every six months, because I could get them for free with my parents' insurance so long as I had them here. These checkups are pretty routine, and I find them a bit annoying, but I know reasonably that they serve to point out problems with my physical well-being. Luckily for me, it's always been small things that I can fix on my own.

As far as I know, medical and dental checkups are fairly standard practice, and it's recommended that everyone have them once in a while. So I was thinking: if that's true for medical and dental checkups, why don't we have psychological checkups? I feel like the things I've been going through recently could have been handled ages ago if I had regular checkups on my psyche like I did my body and my teeth. It's like a medical checkup finding a heart problem that would cause complications if left alone, or a dental checkup finding that your gums are infected and you could lose teeth if it was untreated. That feeling that something wasn't right that was in my mind could have been identified and at least coped with if not dealt with, instead of the years of bottling that I did instead.

What I wanted to know is: do any of you have recommended psych checkups? Is this something that does actually happen and I've just never heard of it? Or does this not happen anywhere, as I suspect? And if so, why? Is it because society keeps treating mental illnesses as less concerning than physical ones and insists that we just 'buck up' instead of seeking help? Are people generally untrusting of psychology? Do people just not believe these problems even exist? Or are psychological characteristics and the illnesses that accompany them actually so complicated and variable and hard to pin down that this is impractical?

Again, now that I've thought about it for the better part of a day, it baffles me why this isn't standard practice. What do you all think about it?

Also, this.