Mental Health Treatment. Is it value for money?

[cronus]

For every John Nash who prevented WWIII with his games theory there are 10,000 at least going the other way. How much is one John Nash worth?

[mistermack]

For every John Nash who prevented WWIII with his games theory there are 10,000 at least going the other way. How much is one John Nash worth?

Never heard of him. Linky ???

[JimC]

A mathematician who was also a little crazy...

[pErvinalia]

I watched a repeat edition of "Nightmare neighbour next door" the other day.
A family were so harassed and intimidated by the man next door, they moved out to the guy's father's house. The neighbour tracked them down and started harassing them there. The police had been involved at various stages but did nothing until then.
One of the cops thought to look up the guy's past. His name was Harry Street, but previously, under the name Barry Williams, he had harassed a previous neighbour, and snapped one day, and went on a shooting spree, killing five people and wounding others.
He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and detained indefinitely.
After fifteen years, he was deemed "safe" to release, given a new name, got married, and eventually started an identical build up of harassing his nearest neighbour. Nobody knew of his history, not even the local police.
He was arrested, and they found a stash of illegal guns and bombs in his house.

If you count up the money spent on his psychiatric treatment over fifteen years, and put it against the measured success, it was on top of everything else, a vast waste of money. For zero result. Or worse, it could easily have ended in another massacre.

How much money is spent in similar fashion on people who can't really be cured?
A lot of the spending on mental health is really "guilt" money. It's not spent with any prospect of making much difference. It's just because those in charge are on a guilt trip that they somehow should be "doing more".
Doing more of fuck all in an awful lot of cases.

The driving force for a lot of the spending is people who say "if only they had intervened sooner, a tragedy could have been averted". When in reality, it would probably be a tragedy delayed, at best.
It's that magic gift of perfect hindsight that busybody politicians always brandish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Wil ... ee_killer)

Keep those conspiracy theories coming.

[JimC]

I watched a repeat edition of "Nightmare neighbour next door" the other day.
A family were so harassed and intimidated by the man next door, they moved out to the guy's father's house. The neighbour tracked them down and started harassing them there. The police had been involved at various stages but did nothing until then.
One of the cops thought to look up the guy's past. His name was Harry Street, but previously, under the name Barry Williams, he had harassed a previous neighbour, and snapped one day, and went on a shooting spree, killing five people and wounding others.
He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and detained indefinitely.
After fifteen years, he was deemed "safe" to release, given a new name, got married, and eventually started an identical build up of harassing his nearest neighbour. Nobody knew of his history, not even the local police.
He was arrested, and they found a stash of illegal guns and bombs in his house.

If you count up the money spent on his psychiatric treatment over fifteen years, and put it against the measured success, it was on top of everything else, a vast waste of money. For zero result. Or worse, it could easily have ended in another massacre.

How much money is spent in similar fashion on people who can't really be cured?
A lot of the spending on mental health is really "guilt" money. It's not spent with any prospect of making much difference. It's just because those in charge are on a guilt trip that they somehow should be "doing more".
Doing more of fuck all in an awful lot of cases.

The driving force for a lot of the spending is people who say "if only they had intervened sooner, a tragedy could have been averted". When in reality, it would probably be a tragedy delayed, at best.
It's that magic gift of perfect hindsight that busybody politicians always brandish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Wil ... ee_killer)

Keep those conspiracy theories coming.

More to the point, mm is making use of an anecdote describing a tragic but very rare situation. Firstly, no one would ever claim that all psychiatric conditions can be cured - the existence of examples where the attempted cure doesn't work says nothing about whether it is worthwhile to pursue appropriate treatments (which of course, need to be evidence based, which admittedly has been lacking in some areas)

Secondly, what it may indicate is that the minority of conditions where the patient is dangerous to others need more oversight and liaison with law enforcement agencies. Overall, the episode does not advance mm's argument about the general inefficacy of treatments for mental health conditions.

[cronus]

Is terminal cancer worth treatment costs? Surely it's better to avoid several years of pointless suffering and deterioration by offering someone with a diagnosis a quicker exit path?

[Scot Dutchy]

Is terminal cancer worth treatment costs? Surely it's better to avoid several years of pointless suffering and deterioration by offering someone with a diagnosis a quicker exit path?

What happens often (it did with my girl friend) when things are looking terminal short term the patient is asked to take part in a research project. With nothing to lose you never know and you are helping advancement in science. They tried marrow transplant one of the many paths they are going down to try and get good white corpuscles back into the body. Her brother was the donor. She did react positively but no where near enough. After that she went to sleep on a morphine pump.

The point was we decided to end it. Not the staff. We had a long frank discussion with the oncologist. No fairy tales. That is what should take place with every patient as you must face reality. Quality of life is the most important.

[Rum]

Prior to the mid 1970s in the UK - and much of the rest of the developed world, huge 'asylums' were the norm. Such was the state of the psychiatric profession not to mention human rights and awareness of personal rights for liberty that if you were unlucky and fell fowl of any number of incidents of bad luck you could end up locked up more or less for life.

Pregnant girls in their teens, people with unclassified mental disabilities and learning difficulties, including Down's, people with neurological disorders, teenagers who went of the rails behaviour wise - any number of misfits - ended up locked up, often for decades and sometimes for life.

As a trainee social worker in the late 70s I had the task of supporting six of these people when our county asylum shut, throwing out several hundred people into the community - 'care in the community' it was called. My job was to held this group, living in a 'group home' to learn how to shop. handle money, pay the bills and navigate loife outside.

It was one of the most gratifying episodes in my career and in a job where outcomes were not always black and white.

Psychiatric hospitals are a great deal more flexible now and the whole culture has changed. To see them as part of some conspiracy and that 'guilt money' is part of the mix shows a level of ignorance that is simply not the case, though from an individual who frequently displays it.

[Svartalf]

psychatric hospitals are a perfect place to die of ennui... I once spent a fortnight in one... I thank god I had taken plenty reading material and stuff to keep my mind busy... gosh, locked inside the ward with a couple dozen folk that go from near normal to completely incommunicable with schizophrenes... and no treatment did I get that I could not have taken in the quiet of my home. well, they sent me away after 2 weeks because there wasz no special reason to keep me, nothing special they'd do for me, and I could get my treatment at home... first thing I did when I got back home and had put my books and stuff back where they belong was to go to nearby pub and drink nearly a gallon of beer.

[Tyrannical]

Hard work, clean air. Best mental health treatment there is. Should close all the funny farms down and relocate to real farms.

[Brian Peacock]

Is terminal cancer worth treatment costs? Surely it's better to avoid several years of pointless suffering and deterioration by offering someone with a diagnosis a quicker exit path?

Absolutely worth the money. Every penny. And there should be 'a quicker exit path' if it's asked for.

[Scot Dutchy]

Is terminal cancer worth treatment costs? Surely it's better to avoid several years of pointless suffering and deterioration by offering someone with a diagnosis a quicker exit path?

Absolutely worth the money. Every penny. And there should be 'a quicker exit path' if it's asked for.

The patient should always be in charge. He should be told real facts not fairy tales of how this medicine might work.

[Svartalf]

Hard work, clean air. Best mental health treatment there is. Should close all the funny farms down and relocate to real farms.

You know that nowadays, farmer's 'hard work' is mostly tied in the use of heavy equipment, be it plowing, sowing, harvesting, milching the kine or whatever...

[Scot Dutchy]

Mostly these days it is high tech. Driverless tractors and drones are doing the work.

[Rum]

Hard work, clean air. Best mental health treatment there is. Should close all the funny farms down and relocate to real farms.

You know that nowadays, farmer's 'hard work' is mostly tied in the use of heavy equipment, be it plowing, sowing, harvesting, milching the kine or whatever...

The slave labour of the mentally ill - Tyrannical's wet dream come true!