I am not sure the answer is framing this as a Left/Right issue like a lot of the thread is doing.
The underlying reason for cuts in Mental Health is the same reason 1,000 State jobs got eliminated this year or $1.2B was cut from FL education the Governor's first year...it is a finite budget problem.
Take the Zika virus, a current South Florida news story gaining national attention. I haven't seen a single news spot/article mention how Zika is linked to the budget cuts (State and local) that gutted mosquito controlling programs. There is no mention how before Zika, in 2009 under former Governor Crist the budget cuts for mosquito control lead to a Dengue outbreak (~4,000 cases). Yet about $5.5M in mosquito control cuts lead to a $5.5B (10%) loss in FL tourism in 2009, these are not calculated political decision of the Right, but difficult budget decision that had horrendous consequences.
To really put it in perspective, Crist later ran for Senate as an Independent and then re-ran for Governor as a Democrat with full support of Obama...party affiliation would not have changed the decisions he made as a Republican Governor. Further take the $1.2B education cut the first year of the new Governor, since then he has fully restored that amount and then some, why? Not because as a member of the Right he changed his political ideology towards education, but the reality is FL is $200B in debt; however, we are no longer running a $3.5B deficit, in fact not only is the budget balanced this year FL is projected to have a surplus and that has allowed the Governor to restore education funding.
"Most of the state will be part of the ocean within fifty years, but don't worry people, we've slashed services so the budget's balanced and your taxes won't go up."
Sometimes you need to spend money to protect against a future where the costs are even higher. The mosquito control initiative could have paid for itself with the sales taxes on that $5.5B in revenue that never happened.
Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from?
Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wouldn't have done it, but he didn't and instead maybe he saved 100 state jobs.
It's easy to know the right decision after the facts, but these budget issues cut both ways. For example, during the housing crisis to keep Florida operating I believe Crist liquidated like 1/3 to 2/3 of FL pension trusts. So, yes it's great that FL didn't shut down, but what happens when FL can't pay retirees pensions?
So if you want $100M for mental Health funding who do you take it from?
Where do you get that money? I bet you could shake $100M out of the prison system if you looked for cases of people being locked up for ridiculously trivial offenses. Given how prisoners often cost $40-60K per year, wouldn't take that many.
I don't expect people to be psychic, but common sense must apply here. When you "save money" by slashing budgets on road repairs, and ten years later your roads are so awful you have to replace them all at great expense, is that really savings?
A bridge that's deteriorating is expensive to fix. A bridge that's collapsed from lack of maintenance is crazy expensive to replace.
The so-called fiscal conservatives are always looking at saving money now, they don't seem to care about what happens tomorrow.
>I bet you could shake $100M out of the prison system if you looked for cases of people being locked up for ridiculously trivial offenses.
Well FL already has programs in place releasing felons to free up funds, so whats a few more felons...although talking about looking at saving money now vs not seeming to care about what happens tomorrow, about 10% of those released early will commit new crimes during the period they should have still been incarcerated.
>The so-called fiscal conservatives are always looking at saving money now, they don't seem to care about what happens tomorrow.
Perhaps they are cutting their nose off despite their face as you suggest due to some warped politically ideology, but they say the same thing about the other side. Looking at the most fiscally healthy states, they are all red states. In fact what makes the most fiscally unhealthy states what they are is not that they are blue, but that they are taking on obligations (usually pension and healthcare) today that will make them insolvent tomorrow. I am aware the common response is sure they don't have the money to pay the obligations but the revenue will come in the future, but history shows that debt simply continues to climb resulting in more and more tough budget cuts...until bankruptcy and while we haven't had one at the State level yet, there are 51 municipalities/cities who have filed (both red and blue, but by far the largest bankruptcies were blue).
Still I maintain it does no good looking at these things as left/right, because they are budget decisions and both ideologies fail and both succeed fiscally. Unfortunately politics gets people taking a side and acting irrationally when confronting facts, say for example how fiscal conservatives hammer Obama for doubling the debt and yet they praise Reagan (who tripled the debt). Or when you get Trump saying Obama is soft on immigration when there have been more deportations during his administration than any other.
Indeed; the length of a political term and the length of the consequences of some of the decisions being made during that term are at odds. Is there a better solution?
It's got a spectrum of those incarcerated that's perhaps skewed a bit more to one extreme than other states like Connecticut but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of people locked away for petty crimes.
The worst is those who are otherwise good citizens but got busted for simple possession and are doing years of time. That costs the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, and after they're branded a felon, they'll probably "re-offend" given they have limited job opportunities.
If you wanted to design a system to generate prisoners they're doing a great job, which given the for-profit prison system, is probably the idea.
>Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one.
not true. Like every action of a politician this one was political too. You can cut 5.5M of mosquito control or, for example, you can release couple hundreds of low level drug offenders or similar. The latter would cost him political career, so he went with the former (which condemned 4000 people to getting the disease).
I 100% agree with your point in priciple. The problem is reality. Government leaders use this principle to overspend on non-productive causes and create debt problems. So end of the day I'd prefer to have a government balancing the budget and leaving some opportunity on the table, rather than the likeyhood debt spent on non-productive causes will become an anchor to future development.
Only the ultra rich bail on a place because of high taxes. Others have connections they place more value on than an incremental increase in tax.
Remember, a lot of these states that are suffering from tax revenue problems have some of the lowest tax rates in the country. Where are people going to flee to? The 49th lowest tax state instead of the 48th?
I was about to wonder aloud why there can't be more private, for-profit mental health facilities instead of private prisons, as huge swathes of the incarcerated population are very mentally unwell and probably do need to be in custody but would likely benefit tremendously from a less oppressive setting. Surely there could be some profit to be extracted by privatization there.
Then I realized it's because they couldn't make mental health patients do slave labor, and why leave all that money on the table when the facilities they'd be building are basically the same, as are the people they'll be housing, once they and their political allies have successfully choked out the public mental health system. Ah the glory of the free market.
Health should not be for-profit. Such a system puts the needy at a tremendous disadvantage. Needing a heart transplant etc. does not put one in a situation to shop around.
Blind worship of a free market can lead to some pretty obscene outcomes.
I am a Canadian and don't have a family doctor and am unclear on the benefits of having one. When I had one years ago I didn't feel like I was getting any extra special attention beyond what I get now by walking into a walk-in clinic and seeing any random doctor.
Perhaps the benefits are clearer if you have ongoing medical issues? Or perhaps my old family doctor wasn't doing things a family doctor is supposed to do in terms of ongoing care?
I'm an American with kickass insurance who doesn't have a "family doctor". I go to a local practice that has 5 or so doctors and a couple of CNP's. I don't always see the same person, but I see someone within 2 or 3 days for routine stuff and same day for urgent stuff. I think that the moderate trade off between "personalization" and availability is totally worth it, especially since it saves me money (my insurance is apparently billed less for an appointment at a group practice, which means eventually my premiums are lower).
For another data point, I live in Australia and can see a doctor, same day or night, for around 20 USD. It is very convenient and I am glad that part of the system runs well enough.
There can be waiting lists for public surgeons however, and private health insurance can help solve that to an extent.
I think we have a good balance here but I am not familiar enough with the nuances of health care to know.
I live in Norway and am covered by the state insurance. I lived my first 30+ years in the states. I have a family doctor that I can change twice a year: Some doctors are busy and can't get you in for minor stuff the same day, but I had that in the states as well. Folks here can go to a private doctor if they choose, and they pay a bit more - but that isn't common.
The wait times are sometimes an issue that needs improvement, but overall the quality of care one has access to is greatly improved. I'll no longer have to be faced with putting off surgery because I can't afford the co-payment, nor afraid of being injured and not affording physical therapy. And this is with insurance.
Here there are ways to get things quicker if the situation is urgent, but there it really was dependent on money. The yearly payments top out at an amount that is less than the deductible I had in the states... and my insurance wasn't bad there. I'll take the universal care and wait times any day.
There are private mental hospitals. They're the ones that are merely pretty bad places to be, but that look nice enough and seem like they'd be tolerable for a short length of time. Most public mental hospitals are terrible places; if I was going to spend a significant portion of my life in such places and knew it that'd be enough to make me depressed all by itself.
There are lots of people in prison who would be better off in mental hospitals but you need to be committed to go to a mental hospital. They're not nice places. Few people are going to voluntarily commit themselves, and that's before considering that (a) They check if you're doing something suicidal every 15 minutes so you get neither sleep nor privacy (b) Lots of psychiatric drugs are hideous. The side effect profiles of anti-psychotics are such that being schizophrenic can look fine.
As to the patients/inmates and facilities you're wrong. A mental hospital looks like a hospital, not a prison, inside and out. They'll have better security than a normal hospital but the comparison is absurd if you've visited both, or even just seen both on tv. And the inmates at a penal institution are enormously more violent that the patients at mental hospitals.
Also a lot of voters seem to think that mental health issues are "your problem" but crime (getting caught with weed mostly, is a social problem that needs severe punishment, not treatment.
People (especially tea-baggers, like Rick Scott) seem to like hurting others more then helping others, all things being equal. All things being unequal, they prefer to profit off of others!
Stuff like this has happened in recent history in Canada too. At the federal level, and the BC provincial level. All in the name of fiscal responsibility, as if people existed for the sake of money, and not the other way around.
It's too bad that the people who founded the country didn't lay down some sort of law against a (then colonial) government sabotaging itself. We even have a vestigial British governor general who could enforce it for us. The word "treason" comes to mind.
Same thing happened in Toronto as the former mental hospital near Allen Gardens in the East End by Cabbagetown was essentially disbanded. A lot of people stayed in the area and can still be found there to this day (it was at least a decade ago, trying to find a media link...)
Yes, it happened in the 80's. I was in Berkeley, CA from 1980 through the end of that decade and the uptick in mentally ill people in Berkeley was staggering. The place was politically friendly and has nice weather, so it was a magnet for people just having been released from institutions, when they didn't have somewhere else to go.
And, of course, police departments all over the country have been sending their homeless and mentally ill to CA and Berkeley for decades, as well.
...and with Margaret Thatcher. In the UK it was called `care in the community`. This also coincided with lots of heroin filling our streets, presumably sold to keep the mercenaries branded mujahadeen paid in Afghanistan.
Seems that we have some horrible drugs on our streets these days so rinse and repeat. Happy days.
If you need to do things off the books one of the best ways to do that is through illegal operations, something made easier when you can do these things with almost zero legal ramifications.
Just like every other political issue, mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are.
Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community.
Also, the ACLU along with the supreme court changed the laws and made it much tougher to confine people for mental health issues. One of the biggest challenges in treating mental health is compliance. Having a mental illness often takes away the ability to see what's best for yourself. Ask a mental patient if they want to go to the hospital, they'll often say no. And based on current laws, there isn't anything we can do about it.
What specifically do you disagree with in the linked timeline?
> mental health, is complicated and there isn't one reason or person for the way things are...
Blaming Reagan ignores the dact that new antipsychotics were developed that allowed patients that were previous confinded to institutions to be released to the community.
The linked timeline mentions these and doesn't "blame Reagan for everything". However the current context of this discussion is slashed budgets for mental health inpatient care and comparisons to the Reagan administration are both obvious and relevant.
It would be nice to know what that bias might be. For example, "bias towards truth" is different than "bias towards restoring the US to British monarchy."
Mother Jones is of course a politically progressive magazine, so there's a bias in the topics they cover. But that sort of bias says nothing about the quality of the coverage. The Economist is also 'incredibly biased' in what it cover, and they do good job of it as well.
Similarly, Mother Jones wins awards, like the National Magazine Awards.
> We report from all side of an issue. We do investigations into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn’t. And all of our journalism is fact-checked, sourced, and linked through. Facts are what we do, and statistical data analysis journalism is a big part of what we do. So I don’t see that part either. And we don’t really lace our reporting with opinion. It’s more, we’re a shop that cares about the little guy and inequality. So that informs some, but by no means all, of our story selection.
I have never, ever, seen Mother Jones do "an investigation into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn't." Maybe there was a time that they were more extremist than the Democrats, and that's what they are referring to. They are basically Fox News, but on the left. Both Fox and MJ make you less informed than before because they leave out facts and stories that don't fit their preconceived viewpoint. They seldom straight-up lie, but the way they frame the stories and what they leave out gives you a distorted picture.
You have TONS of more reputable news sources to choose from like the Atlantic, New Yorker, NYT, Economist, etc. With MJ you're just reading straight-up propaganda and it's very distasteful.
In the case of mental health, a lot of things would have to happen before we could get those mentally ill people off the streets. And Mother Jones would oppose many of those things. For example, we would have to be able to commit more people to institutions against their will. We would have to make it harder to sue mental health professionals or else the government would be bankrupted. To really get a lot of them back to work, we'd have to lower the minimum wage to the point that businesses were actually willing to pay for their time rather than use a robot or an outsourced Indian. But that's a lot more complex than hurr hurr Regan was teh Satan, so you won't find that discussed by MJ.
I am confused by your positioning Mother Jones as no more extremist than the Democrats while also saying "They are basically Fox News, but on the left".
I can't tell from that if you mean that the Democratic party is an extremist party, or if you mean that that Fox News is as moderate towards the right as the Democrats are towards the left, or both.
I thought 'Democracy Now' was more like the left-extreme version of right-extreme Fox News, only much less influential. In any cases, shouldn't your comparison be more to one of the conservative print sources? Is Mother Jones more like the National Review or The American Conservative for the left?
From what you wrote, it's hard for me to tell if your statement that the Mother Jones writing "gives you a distorted picture" is because you also have a distorted partisan view.
About the only times I read an article from Mother Jones is when it was submitted here on HN, which occurs a few times each week according to an HN search.
I looked now at several of their investigation pieces, at http://www.motherjones.com/topics/investigations?page=1 , I do not get the same feeling of being "less informed" that you described. To the contrary, pieces like "They Had Created This Remarkable System for Taking Every Last Dime From Their Customers" and "The World Bank Is Supposed to Help the Poor. So Why Is it Bankrolling Oligarchs?" seem like informative, well-written pieces that I would expect from those reputable sources you mentioned. They also link to primary resources, including SEC filings and court documents. That's not something I see from Fox News reports.
The web site lists only a small number of investigations, I can't find an investigation that the Democrats wish hadn't been reported. I instead looked for other long-form pieces.
The author of those piece is Keven Drum, who has continued with more recent articles like "Democrats Have Done Virtually Nothing for the Middle Class in 30 Years".
These do not appear to be something the Democratic Party would wish published.
My examination is only cursory, so while I don't see how you reached your conclusion, you have the longer experience with Mother Jones to be a better judge.
I believe that Mother Jones is to the left of the traditional Democrat party platform. I also believe that Fox News is to the right of the traditional Republican party platform. In that way, I think the two publications are similar.
Basically, I don't consider either publication a useful source of news. In general, both of them leave out the context that would be needed to understand what is going on in the world. For example, that Mother Jones article about "Why is [the world bank] Bankrolling Oligarchs" leaves out the context of what has been going on in Myanmar in the last few years. Myanmar has gone from being a completely military-run state, to allowing a limited democratic opposition to exist. The World Bank is making investments there partly as a kind of reward for that. If the World Bank left, other countries like China would step in and try to buy influence there with their own equivalent of the IMF (China Development Bank). It invests in bigger companies because it has to, because the managerial overhead of investing in tiny ones would be way too high.
All the same issues exist in our government's aid programs to poor countries. The money does indeed often get siphoned off to the rich and well-connected. But of course Mother Jones doesn't comment on this, becuase the narrative is government = good, World Bank = bad. If facts or context have to be left out to fit the narrative, they always will.
I could go on, but you get the idea. By leaving out facts and, most especially, context, biased news sources like these leave you less informed after you read them than before.
:-) I like both of those publications because they wear their bias on their sleeves. It's easier to extract information when you don't have to also try to reverse engineer the bias.
Because one political party, currently mostly ruling Florida, has made a core mission out of defunding anything that benefits anyone not already wealthy, not part of a small set of favored programs, or "defense"[1] spending.
People with mental issues don't make political donations, rarely vote, and can't defend themselves. QED.
[1] We can argue about which was really the the last defensive war fought by the US, but by any reasonable measure it is at least almost gone from living memory.
Or perhaps you are choosing to interpret my words in a way that leads to a silly result.
The much more obvious reading starts with noting that the party ruling Florida is the same party that also happens to have policy positions that are of a piece at the local, state and national level positions.
- If you're playing that game where overstating things for political effect because you [...], have fun, but I don't want to play.
- If you actually believe that, either your priorities are so very far removed from mine that we have nothing to say to each other, or you have blinded yourself to a huge array of very real differences with very real effects on very real people. In which case, find someone else to argue with; I prefer to debate politics with people who live in the real world.
I'm pretty sure what's being presented is the opposite situation, where private companies have an industry taken away, rather than handed to them.
That said, I'm not entirely sure how increased regulation makes it impossible to manage as long as the rest of the market is allowed to work. It's fairly obvious that both capitalism and socialism have very real downsides when unfettered. It's a balancing act.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. You astutely point out that just as defunding can cause a move toward privatization (or the belief that only private enterprise can solve a given problem), so too can overregulation lead toward nationalization (or even at state/local levels, the belief that only government can solve it).
Because some people feel that businesses being strangled by regulation is a favorite straw man those in favor of deregulation trot out to protect their interests. The original scenario, at least in the opinions of some people, is a nice summary of the abuses of privatization while the down voted scenario is a right wing bogeyman meant to scare the ignorant into voting against their own interests. (In some people's opinion)
Rick Scott's administration passed a law that said welfare recipients must be drug tested in order to receive benefits. Rick Scott's family has a lot (~68/200 million) invested in some of those facilities.
I hope you don't get voted down, because it's just the way things are. It is really mind boggling how many GOP supporters try and deny this. What has happened in FL since the early 00's is just criminal. How opponents of Rick Scott couldn't get him ejected from office is a mystery to me, if it's not solely "money in politics."
I hope it gets voted down. It was John F. Kennedy that introduced the Community Mental Health act of 1963 to close down and defund mental institions. The idea of cutting spending for mental facilities was put forth by the Democratic party, not GOP. Both parties have continued ever since.
No. This is an old, standard Republican mis-talking point that (as usual) is unsupported by facts.
The Community Mental Health act was fully funded at the time it was passed, to the tune of $330 million, and received almost $2 billion over the next decade. It was an example of an INCREASE in federal funding for mental health, put forth by Democrats, and bitterly opposed by Republicans.
Individual states, with Republican blessing, were the culprits in not continuing to fund local clinics. Then in 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan changed federal mental health funding to make it a block grant, spendable by states any old way they chose. And many chose NOT to spend it on mental health. Not content to turn Californians with mental illness out in the street (which he did as California governor), he decided he'd do that to America at large.
Don't try to blame Dems for standard Republican obstructionism that damaged and continues to damage public health.
The problem, and this applies to both parties and liberals and conservatives, is that politics is rarely evidence based. It's anecdote based, because that's what's easier to get people to relate to. There are plenty of liberal policies that are disasters, just as there are conservative ones, but if you attempt to change them it's an attack on that ideology, regardless of how well the policy is working in practice. The biggest problem with politics isn't that politicians are insular and out for themselves and their own interests/area, it's that they've all got their heads stuck so far into the ground they don't even know whether what they are doing is actually helping or hurting. Confirmation bias at its worst and most harmful.
To be fair we (FL) have had a horrible track record with mental health care for the better part of 5 decades. While I am no fan of Scott and his corruption the state of mental health care in FL has been on a slow roll downhill for a long time and both sides are just as culpable.
>Is Florida going to add more police, social workers, ER doctors and etc deal with the consequences?
no. Like all the others it will add more prisons. Prison guards unions and commercial prison providers are doing exceptionally well financially and the prison guard unions are actually the biggest and most powerful lobbyists, at least in CA.
There is no such thing as decrease of spending, there are only increase and redistribution - benefiting the most powerful of course.
I've never heard of the correctional officers' union (CCPOA) being a top lobbyist. I don't see it anywhere on this list, which puts it out of the top 100.
Edit: I can't find any primary sources regarding lobbying by the CCPOA, but I did find a blog on a site called Union Watch that makes the claim about CCPOA being the largest lobbyist, and then I saw that quotes in Reason, and the a lot of people quoting Reason. So, right-wing echo chamber in action as far as I can tell.
i meant "lobbyist" in the more wide sense than the pure officially reported total sum of receipts of breakfasts with senators. I meant it in the sense of demonstrated ability to steer decisions to their own benefit.
And when it come to right/left wing - while both are unions, teachers union and prison guard union are on the opposite sides, so pigeon-hole accordingly.
So you believe that adding up all election and/or legislation-influencing activities would reveal that CCPOA is the largest actor in California politics, despite the fact that even in above-board registered lobbying the oil industry spent $22 million last year? I think your claim requires some substantiation.
>CCPOA is the largest actor in California politics
it isn't exactly full order, so you kind of right in questioning my statements at their absolute face value. It is more like partial order here - oil industry and the guards have orthogonal interests. Except for the one aspect - guards consume state budget while oil industry is a source of it. And as we know from the business community whining - CA is considered "not business friendly"/"high tax state". Though of course i don't think the guards and oil clash directly here - the guards' politics is more about redistribution of the budget away from the other categories. I.e the oil and the guards have their own big fields to play, and when it comes to their own fields, the guards have much higher success than oil in their respective fields in CA.
And, man, $22 millions is just a rounding error for either of the players - the CA prison budget is $10B.
If you remember the beginning of Schwarzenegger's time, the first thing he did was taking on the biggest problem of the state - the guards union. He failed. No surprise here given the nature of the task. Still my personal great respect to him - he was the only one who even have ever tried to do it.
That's a bizarre interpretation of events. Schwarzenegger went along with the prison industry by vigorously opposing Prop. 66 (reforming the three strikes rule) and generally taking a "tough on crime" stance. Prison population increased every year under his administration until a court (and eventually the US Supreme Court) finally ordered the state to reduce it. Schwarzenegger's solution to overcrowding was to ship inmates to other states, which is shock doctrine privatization, not union busting.
Brown has actually reduced the prison population, notably by reforming sentencing laws and reclassifying many crimes as misdemeanors. The California prison population now stands at a level lower than in 1996, and a per-capita level lower than in 1992.
The real issue is a legal, not financial one. The ACLU fought a long time ago to make it very hard to commit anyone, very hard to give them treatment while committed, very hard to keep them there, etc.
No matter how much city/states spend, they can't fill up the hospitals and treat patients, which is why most of the hospitals were closed.
If you are interested, there's a very thorough book on the subject that I'd recommend:
This conclusion does cut both ways. It should be acknowledged that treatment at mental institutions then was horrific. Current treatment is not much better.
Maybe they were worried about a downtick in "Florida Man" stories? This is one sure way to keep your state in the "News of the Weird" segment every week.
The Florida Man phenomenon is mainly a result of the state's stringent public-records laws [1]:
"Since 1909, Florida has had a proud tradition that all government business is public business and therefore should be available to the public. That means all records, including photos and videos, produced by a public agency are easily accessible with a few narrow and obvious exceptions. Public officials are also required to open all of their meetings — even unofficial ones — to the public."
Shit. That's bad. Those CC camera clips make it look more like the time I spent as a bouncer than someplace where people are safely receiving treatment for their mental conditions.
Well, I'm only partially joking when I point out that wherever you were a bouncer at was likely a place quite a few people voluntarily went to treat their mental conditions.
When mental health services are cut, the burden doesn't go away but gets picked up by police and hospitals, who aren't properly equipped to handle those challenges. The SFPD and ambulances spend massive amounts of time responding to emergencies involving mentally ill homeless, which limits their ability to respond to other problems.
Check out the West Oakland BART stop for a good example. There is an ambulance there nearly every day for several hours dealing with the same mentally ill addicted woman. Imagine what it costs to tie up a couple cop cars, an ambulance, and a full ambulance crew. Plus the ER services.
Now compare that to the cost of dealing properly with one mentally ill person.
Cutting mental health services doesn't save us money; it magnifies both the root problem, and the costs.
My question was what is the total cost of Florida's mental hospitals and if that is worth it. Assuming that $100M cut was a 10% cut it means that the total expenditure could be $1B. Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida.
Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and if people agree to it and if the mental hospitals are free for everyone. But that was not my question here.
Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on.
To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost about $50B / year in the state.
Assuming your numbers government spends $15k for every 1 of those 300 people. That number seems pretty high.
The Tampa Bay investigation's violence refers to violence in the hospitals itself and not the general violence in society. For 13.5K per year you might reduce the hospital staff by 10% but that is unlikely to result into chaos that the report seems to suggest.
> about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population
Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
Ok, sure, you can add in roads and it will change the numbers in a small way that will be irrelevant to the thread. You can spend an infinite amount of time making rough estimates more accurate, if that's what you're into.
No I think it's very relevant to the thread. You have not accounted for any other services that people receiving mental health care receive from the state at all. You're ignoring most of the state's spending. Your estimate is not just rough; it can't possibly be anywhere near the mark.
The article states that, at its highest, the annual expenditure was about 420M, so this is nearly a 25% cut in spending. Florida also ranks 49th in spending for mental health services [1], spending less than 1/3 annually per person than the average state. They also have the third highest percentage of mentally ill and uninsured people in the country.
To put this in perspective, Florida spent over $2.2B on its corrections system in 2014 [2].
As someone who is an inconsolable bipolar wreck without therapy and medications, go fuck yourself. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.
They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry.
3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on the person he was claiming had a chemical imbalance. He was questioned what kind of tests he did and he said he watched him for 2 hours. No actual medical tests. It's very subjective and not scientific in most cases.
Go out and learn about what happens in mental hospitals. My ex was schizo-affective, and I've spent some time in some of the hospital wards and the system and stuff. If a child or adult was there because of something like ADHD, it wasn't the sort of thing you are describing. Folks there are generally dealing with things that the rest of us couldn't imagine going through properly - as attested by your attitude. Severe depression, anxiety, bipolar, severe addiction, and other such things needing actual medical oversight.
Are there horrible people practicing? Sure, but that is society at large. Most of the folks helping others want to help. Like everything else, we hear these stories because they are outliers. Some things Are subjective because we don't have the medical tests yet and we have to go by what the patient is willing to describe... but yet, if you give the wrong sort of medicine, it reacts badly. This still happens in "regular" medicine as well when we don't have proper diagnostic tools available. When we know more and have definitive tests widely available, we can do these things you describe.
Yeah, maybe I just witnessed some bad things when I was younger about this industry, which I kinda wish I would forget. Being in rural Ohio, they were probably more desperate for money but from what I find online it seems to not be isolated. Just something I never really been comfortable talking about and bottled up inside.
This world is a really screwed up place. Some people took their kids to like 3 different places just to get meds to zombify them so they don't have to be parrents and actually watch their kids. Or some put their kids in mental hospitals to try and scare them. It just really makes me sad and I feel like they're doing more harm than good. At least some of the places locally I know of got a bad rating like average of 2-3 stars. Some of this stuff is just too close to home.
The medicines they prescribe kills more than heroin. And that's not even counting the shock theory. Yes, they still do that... Here's a video I found a while back on the modern day version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2-B-aluCE
It sucks people on HN down votes people for being the messenger of bad news. and full disclaimer, I am not affiliated with any of these mentioned sites or organizations. I just always had a bad feeling about psychiatry and these people confirm how bad they really are.
They sit around a table voting on stuff to add to the DSM... You sit with them for like 10 minutes and "Oh you're bipolar." No MRI or blood test... The same people who said being gay was a mental illness. So why trust a industry promoting hate and still promoting ADHD which was admitted as being a work of fiction.
There's a group called Citizens Commission on Human Rights that made documentaries on the subject which are really convincing. Seen their commercial one day on TV, and spent a night watching some of their material.
There's a clip somewhere on YouTube where someone went to like 5 different psychiatrists but was told all different things. Then they also had a mother tell her story about how a psychiatrist killed her son Matthew.
I already had a bad view of the industry, but after watching their content it really reinforced my feelings towards them.
Edit: Found the video I was talking about it. http://www.cchr.org/videos.html The first one on that page, It's about a hour but I think it does a great job at exposing psychiatry. I think everyone including parrents should watch this before visiting a psychiatrist
Yeah, Scientology seems a bit extreme. Apparently, they get in a really hot sauna for hours to cleanse and it sounds really unsafe to me. But besides them being part of Scientology, I do think they make some valid points.
The CCHR has to be considered in context. Robert Whitaker's book, Anatomy of an Epidemic [1], makes the case that Scientologists were used by the drug companies to deflect criticism of the mass use of ineffective drugs:
THE CRITICS BELIEVE IN ALIENS
The story of a "psychopharmacology revolution" had first been
told in the 1950s and 1960s, and then, as we've seen in this chapter,
it was revived in the 1980s. However, the storytellers in the 1980s
were more vulnerable to criticism than the storytellers of the earlier
decades simply because there was now twenty years of research that
undermined their narative. None of the drugs had proven to help
people function well over the long term, and the chemical-
imbalance theory of mental disorders was in the process of flaming
out. As NIMH researchers had concluded in 1984, "elevations or
decrements in the functioning of serotonergic systems per se are not
likely to be associated with depression." ... There was a Grand
Canyon-sized gap between what the broken-brain storytellers
were intimating was true and what was actually known, and that
same gap would appear in their stories when Prozac and the other
second-generation drugs came to market. But fortunately for the
proponents of biological psychiatry, criticism of the medical model
and of psychiatric drugs became associated, in the public mind,
with Scientology.
...
... In 1969, Scientology and Thomas Szasz cofounded the Citizens
Commission on Human Rights, and this group began waging
campaigns against lobotomy, electroshock, and psychiatric drugs.
This proved to be very fortuitous for the APA [American Psychiatric
Association] and its storytelling partners as they raised the flag of
biological psychiatry. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the drug
companies deciding to secretly fund Scientology's protests, eager
as they were to shove money to any organization that would --
wittingly or unwittingly -- advance their cause. For not only did
Scientologist believe in extraterrestrials, they also had gained a
reputation for being a secretive, litigious, and even malevolent
cult. Scientology, Time wrote in 1991, is a "hugely profitable
global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics
in a Mafia-like manner." Thanks to Scientology, the powers that
be in psychiatry had the perfect storytelling foil, for they could
now publicly dismiss criticism of the medical model and
psychiatric drugs with a wave of the hand, deriding it as
nonsense that arose from people who were members of a
deeply unpopular cult, rather than criticism that arose from
their own research. As such, the presence of Scientology in the
storytelling mix served to taint all criticism of the medical model
and psychiatric drugs, no matter what its source.
Those were the storytelling forces that formed in the 1980s.
When Prozac arrived on the market, they were lined up perfectly
for the creation -- and maintenance -- of a tale about psychiatry's
great new leap.
-pg 280-282
Chapter 14, on the next page, opens with this quote: "When it comes to dead bodies in current psychotropic trials, there are a greater number of them in the active treatment groups than in the placebo groups. This is quite different from what happens in penicillin trials or trials of drugs that really work." -David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University, Wales (2008)
The underlying reason for cuts in Mental Health is the same reason 1,000 State jobs got eliminated this year or $1.2B was cut from FL education the Governor's first year...it is a finite budget problem.
Take the Zika virus, a current South Florida news story gaining national attention. I haven't seen a single news spot/article mention how Zika is linked to the budget cuts (State and local) that gutted mosquito controlling programs. There is no mention how before Zika, in 2009 under former Governor Crist the budget cuts for mosquito control lead to a Dengue outbreak (~4,000 cases). Yet about $5.5M in mosquito control cuts lead to a $5.5B (10%) loss in FL tourism in 2009, these are not calculated political decision of the Right, but difficult budget decision that had horrendous consequences.
To really put it in perspective, Crist later ran for Senate as an Independent and then re-ran for Governor as a Democrat with full support of Obama...party affiliation would not have changed the decisions he made as a Republican Governor. Further take the $1.2B education cut the first year of the new Governor, since then he has fully restored that amount and then some, why? Not because as a member of the Right he changed his political ideology towards education, but the reality is FL is $200B in debt; however, we are no longer running a $3.5B deficit, in fact not only is the budget balanced this year FL is projected to have a surplus and that has allowed the Governor to restore education funding.