May we please stop stigmatizing mental health care in this country with threads in which DUers

[TygrBright]

27. Agree with you about stigmatizing mental illness...

You can see my take on it in my Journal.

BUT - your heading is a bit misleading, because I'm all in favor of calling out (is it "stigmatizing" when it's simply accurate description?) what is painfully euphemistically called "mental health care" in America.

Here is Fuller Torrey's (a VERY smart observer who's been in the field a long time) take on mental health care in America.

Short version: It's suckier than it's ever been for pretty much everyone, and it's always been pretty sucky.

Pre-Reagan it was "dump them in a mental hospital" and that might not have been too bad in some cases EXCEPT that mental hospitals a) were never funded to provide even basic conditions of human decency for most inmates; and b) even where they were well-intentioned, they still relied on a horrific array of "treatments" that rarely did much except make people suffer.

Then things "improved" by "deinstitutionalizing" people. That is, putting them on the streets where they could be homeless and miserable and get even less help.

We are now in a bifurcated system where we have pharmacological interventions available for those who can afford to pay, and some of those pharmacological interventions make some short-term improvements possible but do little for long-term well-being (and may have hellish side effects), and some of those pharmacological interventions eventually produce no results at all and have vicious withdrawal profiles when the people taking them realize they're no longer helping. We do have a few, painfully few, interventions in therapeutic technique that provide some assistance for some people, but again, they're available only for those who can afford them.

Everyone else, that is, those who can't afford to private-pay for non-harmful interventions for as long as they are needed, is just fucked. Fucked on their own, fucked on the street, fucked in a hellscape of uncaring greed-headed "mental health care" underfunded, under-reseached and unavailable.

So, yeah, stigmatize that from hell to breakfast.

But quit conflating "mentally ill" with "evil" or "stupid" or "catastrophically bad at decision-making."

helpfully,
Bright