The Accessibility of Care
The political, financial and medical worlds rank the mental health of the nation’s citizens based on their access to “mental health care”, not on the actual state of their mental health nor on the outcomes of treatment. New reports from Mental Health America underscore these wrong targets.
These are some of the measures used in these reports to rank the 50 states and the District of Columbia on their citizens’ mental health status:
- Number of people with “mental illness”
- Number of children who have “Emotional Behavioral Developmental Issues” (EBD)
- Number of people who have suicidal thoughts or who have attempted suicide
- Number of children who have had “at least one major depressive episode”
- Number of people who do not have access to mental health care or to mental health care insurance
- State hospital re-admission rates
As you are undoubtedly aware, counting the number of people with “mental illness” or with “EBD” or with “depression” is totally specious, as the diagnostic criteria in psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), are fraudulent.
As you are also undoubtedly aware, counting the number of people who have suicidal thoughts or who have attempted suicide is equally specious, as some of the known side effects of psychotropic drugs are violent behavior, and suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide.
State hospital re-admission rates are evidently how they measure the effectiveness of treatment, under the assumption that the higher the re-admission rate the less effective the treatment. Again, a specious measure, as the side effects of psychotropic drugs all but guarantee re-admissions and thus provide an argument for even more “treatment.”
And if you did not already know, “specious” means “superficially plausible but actually wrong.”
The emphasis in these reports is to identify and treat so-called “mental illness” at the youngest age possible. The psychiatric industry wants to hire an additional 30,000 child psychiatrists to handle this imagined need.
So we are basically left to surmise that reporting on the mental health status of the various states is an attempt to “show” that there is not enough insurance available to get everyone, particularly children, into the mental health care system, and that the various insurance companies, states and the federal government need to spend more on this fraudulent, ineffective and abusive mental health care system.
Missouri, by the way, is ranked 22nd in its citizens’ overall access to this kind of mental health care. A critical aspect of these reports is to show the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on access to mental health care; particularly, they hope to show that the ACA does not provide enough improvement in access to psychiatric mental health care, and that more money is needed to get more children into this system and taking psychotropic drugs. One of the other targets of these reports is to provide evidence suggesting that the definition of “medically necessary” be expanded so that more people fit into the category of needing “behavioral health care,” and thus needing more psychotropic drugs.
The mental health monopoly has practically zero accountability and zero liability for its failures. This has allowed psychiatrists and psychologists to commit more fraud and abuse than any other area of health care.
The primary purpose of mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. The only effective measure of this treatment must be “patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.”
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