JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" ignores the real Appalachian crisis it portrays

I started reading JD Vance's 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" on election day, 2020. It is one thing to call Vance a “Trump whisperer” and attempt to utilize his book as an answer for the vote, but it is something else entirely to take him on as a “fiercely astute social critic.” For all of his supposedly fierce astuteness, and all of his focus on hereditary genes, Vance somehow managed to never engage with the fact that his mother and grandmother both struggle with mental health issues that look very much like bipolar episodes. The point it makes, if any, is that mountain men are an ornery lot" who would “shoot a 'furriner' on sight and whale the daylights out of daughter when she sold her acre to help Doc Barnard establish a health clinic in the hills.” "Mountain Justice" pits a hillbilly father against his daughter who, Nugent wrote, “picked up her new-fangled notions at a nurses' training school.” The daughter is trying to better herself and work to uplift her people, just like plucky little JD Vance, but her father would rather beat her than see her succeed. At a time when, according to the American Psychological Association, “we are facing a national mental health crisis that could yield serious health and social consequences for years to come,” both Vance and Howard have strewn their stories with suicide and domestic violence and then looked at every reason except for the psychiatric ones. The closest Vance ever comes is to say of his mother that “she listened too much to the wrong voice in her head.” Of his own mental health, he says he tried counseling once but “it was just too weird.” Howard opts for hysterics, zooming in on a scantily clad Adams laying in the street with blood dripping from her razored wrists, only to have her mother sum up the situation by saying, “She just stopped trying.” The film closes with a Vance voice-over explaining that “we choose every day who we become,” a statement that feels like it is pointed directly at the “choices” of hot mess Bev.