“Ask him how much he loves his mother.”
“Ask him how much he hates his father.”
“Give him a pill.”
“Send him back to work or to school.”
-Curriculum for every class, ever, in psychiatry and psychology on the treatment of the mentally disturbed patient.
There was this Abnormal Psychology class that I took as an undergrad. At the beginning of the semester, the professor told the class that he would give an “A” to any student who could prove to him the case of a single patient who was EVER cured of a mental disorder through psychoanalysis. At the end of the semester he told us that in his couple of decades of teaching, with this offer made regularly, he had never once had to award that “A”.
Talking about your problems can be cathartic, but you can achieve the same (or better) result talking to a rock for free than talking to a “professional” for a few hundred dollars an hour.
The absurdity, stupidity and ineffectiveness of the alleged “Mental Health” treatment system as it exists today is no different from the overriding purpose and goal of the entire Medical-Industrial Complex: Profit based on treatment. There is no goal or objective of a cure, only a self-perpetuating forever stream of meaningless, short-sighted prophylactic treatment, meant to placate the patient and enrich the health care practitioner.
This is bad enough in the physical health realm, where sick individuals remain sick as they endure years of pain and depressing disabilities as their life savings are drained and as doctors and insurance companies post obscene profits. But, in the mental health realm, in a society where the flow of deadly firearms is virtually unrestricted, the result is tragic, on a daily basis.
Setting aside for a moment the actual lack of success in mental health treatment, the first question is whether or not at-risk individuals even receive the care that is available? The answer to that is a resounding NO. As reported by Mental Health America in a 2017 study, over a three year period youth depression had increased from 8.5% to 11.1%, that over 40 million Americans had a “mental health condition”, and that across the country, 56% of American adults with a mental illness did not receive treatment. Maybe even more frightening is this statistic: In the combined states of Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama, 57,000 people with mental health conditions were in PRISON! In fact, across the country the single most effective “Treatment” for mental health issues appears to be IMPRISONMENT. But that effectiveness is for the public at large and NOT for the mentally ill individual who is treated as a criminal rather than as someone suffering from a serious medical condition.
The chart above, created by Mental Health America from the study data, demonstrates several things. First, the highest rate of incarceration in the country are in red, right-wing-dominated states, that the states with with least access to existing mental health care are red, right-wing-dominated states, and finally, that the states with the highest incarceration rates are the same state that provide the least access to mental health care.
Just think of the chart if mental health treatment was actually effective and helped people before they proceeded to criminal, and violent, behavior.
In a report released about ten years ago by the American Counseling Association, they produced a series of conclusions that when examined closely, reveal not success as they allege, but remarkable and pervasive FAILURE of mental health services provided to those in need. Exampled include:
They gloat that among drug users and abusers, drug treatment programs have successfully reduced drug use in 40 to 60 percent of users, and reduced arrests among them by 40%. This is supposed to be success? NO, it is abject FAILURE, with 40-60% of treated drug users REMAINING USERS and 60% of them still eventually being arrested for crimes related to their drug use.
They boast that among seniors that commit suicide, “only” 75% of them had received mental health services over the preceding month. 75%? Really, only one-in-four benefitted from the care they received?
In 2013, the New York Times posted an article that described some reasons why overall mental health therapies were in fact so unsuccessful.
The overall finding described in the article were that therapists routinely choose therapies that are among the least successful in a supposed bag of tricks, making therapy choices based on personal preferences and prejudices and long-ago determinations, with scant regard for current research of developments in the field. Further, patients are most often subjected to what the author calls a “dim-sum” approach:
“…many patients are subjected to a kind of dim-sum approach – a little of this, a little of that, much of it derived more from the therapist’s biases and training than from the latest research findings. And even professionals who claim to use evidence-based treatments rarely do.”
Interviewed for the article, Glenn Waller, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Sheffield, was quoted as stating that large numbers of people with mental health problems “are getting therapies that have very little chance of being effective”.
The article also describes a Columbia University study that found that research findings had little influence on whether mental-health providers learned and used new treatments.
Rather, the study concluded, what was important to therapists and their treatment choices was continuing their current “favorite” types of therapy, adding or changing only if new methods could be integrated into what they already provided.
This article does, however, boast of the supposed success in recent years, and decades, of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). However, recent studies conducted at various facilities around the world have seriously called into question the success of CBT, showing its proper place among the many failures that practitioners in the fields of mental heath treatment have foisted upon those needing help.
Many of these studies, and CBT failures, were described in the article “Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as Effective as Clinicians Believe?” published by psychotherapynetworker.org:
”A 2013 meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychology Review comparing CBT to other therapies reported that it had failed to “provide corroborative evidence for the conjecture that CBT is superior to bona fide non-CBT treatments.”
”In November 2014, an 8-week clinical study conducted by Sweden’s Lund University concluded that CBT was no more effective than mindfulness-based therapy for those suffering from depression and anxiety.”
In 2012, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare concluded after a two-year trial period that CBT had “no noticeable advantage”.
This past May saw publication of a meta-analysis conducted by psychologists Tom Johnsen, of UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, and Oddgeir Friborg, of the University of Tromso, conducted between 1977 and 2014 and which concluded that “the effects of CBT have declined linearly and steadily since its introduction, as measured by patients’ self-reports, clinicians’ ratings, and rates of remission.” According to Johnsen, even the rosy quantitative findings about CBT in its early days should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Over the past two days, the country watched in sadness as information unfolded about a shooting in Virginia Beach, VA where at lease a dozen innocent victims were shot to death in a government building. In my hometown of West Covina, CA, a safe and serene suburb 20 miles due east of downtown Los Angeles, where these thing DO NOT HAPPEN, on May 31 there was a mass shooting barely a mile from my house, where one person was killed and three wounded. Unknown to 99.9999% of Americans, there were two more mass shootings yesterday, June 1, both in Chicago, where amazingly no one was killed but where a total of eight were wounded. Going a bit further back, May 30 was an easy day, only one mass shooting, none killed, five wounded, but the day before, May 29, was a bad one, with two mass shootings, in Cleveland and in Reserve, LA, where a total of four were killed and five more wounded. gunviolencearchive.org. It is amazing how the media chooses to treat mass shootings, and it is depressing and angering that the public really sees little of what
is happening. The Virginia Beach shooting was “NEWS” to be broadcast non-stop by every main stream media outlet, but the shootings in West Covina, Chicago, Cleveland and Reserve, and elsewhere, are ignored as if they never happened.
The most vile, reprehensible and sickening mass shootings are school shootings. Remember the abhorrence among so many immediately after such shootings as those in 2012 in Newtown, CT (28 killed) and in 2018 in Parkland, FL (17 killed)? What has been done on a nationwide basis to stop such showing since? NOTHING. But there haven’t been any school shootings since Parkland, or have there? Maybe it just isn’t news anymore, maybe its the status quo?
IN FACT, since the Parkland shooting on Feb. 2, 2018, there have been 41 SCHOOL SHOOTINGS across the United States, 15 this year through the end of May, with 33 wounded victims.
In fact, over the past 10 years statistics show that across the United States school shootings continue to surpass the rest of the industrialized world in unprecedented and disgusting numbers, numbers that demonstrate how in the United States the safety of our citizens, the safety of our children, is meaningless, and that special interests override and cover up the deficiencies of our society in both seeking out the mentally unstable and in providing meaningful help, and in passing workable, sustainable, pervasive gun laws that protect potential victims and restrict the self-centered relics of the old west and of the Civil War.
“According to the Association for Children’s Mental Health, addressing mental health needs in schools is vital because “1 in 5 children and youth have a diagnosable emotional, behavioral or mental health disorder, and 1 in 10 young people have a mental health challenge that is severe enough to impair how they function at home, school or in the community.” And it says that many estimates show that among kids aged 6 to 17, ‘at least one-half and many estimate as many as 80 percent’ don’t receive the mental health care they require.”
-“If Americans really cared about students’ mental health, these school ratios would be very different”, Washington Post, Feb. 15, 2018.
This article also states than in today’s US schools, there is ONE school psychologist for every 1,381 students.
At least give them a chance at some kind of help, before it’s too late.
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Pervasive gun violence is not the only result of the bankrupt US healthcare system, but the vast expansion in recent years of homeless people is a second result. The only way to realistically and effectively “Solve” the homeless problem pervasive through today’s American society is by providing needed care and services to people on the brink, BEFORE they become homeless.
This subject will be discussed in detail in the near future.