Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed

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.

Five years ago they ran "Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich", http://www.alternet.org/story/151108/why_the_democratic_part... (first appeared in Mother Jones, but doesn't appear to be online) and "Why Screwing Unions Screws the Entire Middle Class" at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit... , which contains among other things the line "The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class".

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.

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)

[1] http://www.madinamerica.com/product/62043/

I highly recommended this book for anyone who might ever have to defend themselves or someone their care about against a conventional psychiatrist.

This conclusion does cut both ways. It should be acknowledged that treatment at mental institutions then was horrific. Current treatment is not much better.

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.

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.