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My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

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Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#131

Post by hristov »

Shorel wrote: post #73
hristov wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of research showing that marijuana speeds up the onset of schizophrenia in patients that are already genetically predisposed to it. See: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2005559-2,00....

Both alcohol and tobacco are legal, and have worse health consequences than marijuana. The only real reason is that 90-70 years ago, the white people smoke tobacco and the black people smoke marijuana.

This is not the point. My point is that marijuana can speed up the onset of schizophrenia and should not be used by people that have family history of mental illness. It has nothing to do with what is legal and what isn't. Even if marijuana were legalized, my point would still stand.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#132

Post by chromatic »

efa wrote: post #88
debacle wrote: post #10

You can blame the schools for misdiagnosing ADHD, and you can blame them for a poor IEP, but you can't blame them for a child not having a normal life due to one of the most tragic diseases known to man. Schizophrenia is not the kind of disease you can treat with an IEP, and it sounds like the author's son fell out of the system from a very young age. Trying to blame anything but genetics and development for his son'…

I completely agree with you. I think these demands on society are unrealistic. You can't expect that out of teachers and pediatricians. My experience with the school system (I have a daughter with autism) has been much better then his sounds (I hope so given it's 40 years later). We have no push back in getting our developmental pediatricians' input into our daughter's IEP. Our school provides speech and occupational…

I assumed that that "one in every four adults" statistic includes things like depression.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#133

Post by aes256 »

lwat wrote: post #97
aes256 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like the term 'mental illness', not so much because of the stigma attached to it, but because the term implies there is some 'normal' from which only a small subsection of the population deviates. In reality, there is no 'normal'. There is no one person with perfect mental health; perfect clarity of thought, perception, of feeling and action. Everyone, to put things bluntly, is a little fucked up. Thus…

A mental illness is a mental abnormality that significantly impacts on your quality of life or the lives of those around you. That's the definition.

Well yes, my point is that you can draw the line in any number of places. Even if we were to agree upon your definition — and there are many different, conflicting definitions of 'mental illness' — what constitutes a significant impact on quality of life?

At some point you have to draw an arbitrary line, and even then it's frequently a guessing game working out on which side of the line someone actually lies.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#134

Post by philh »

fusiongyro wrote: post #54
ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when it makes both ethical and financial sense. It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.

The article I'm remembering actually addressed that. The program was limited to a very small number of people--tens, or fewer. They actually had one that wrecked his apartment every week, and still it was cheaper to fix it back up than to let this guy back on the street, where he would incur about $1M a year in ER bills. One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited.

The fraud that jumps to my mind is a hypothetical person taking a free apartment, when they are perfectly capable of supporting themselves and would do so if the alternative was homelessness. That's certainly not cheaper.

I make no claims about how common this kind of fraud would actually be.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#135

Post by wonderzombie »

angersock wrote: post #113
wonderzombie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is too fatalistic. This sets the bar far too low -- you could substitute poverty or crime in here without substantially altering the meaning. No, you cannot "cure" it or "fix" it, but the alternative isn't "do nothing." That's a false dichotomy. At a minimum you can look for ways mitigate the impact it has on our society. See the pieces elsewhere in this thread which discuss the cost to our society incur…

Not so much...the fatalism here is not unwarrented. If I give a pauper a million dollars, they are no longer a pauper--foolish noveau riche, perhaps, but not a pauper. If I repeal laws pertaining to various things, drugs for example, a great many criminals cease to be so. Mental illness, unfortunately, tends to stay with the person. :(

That's true, but again, at least we ought to evaluate what the cost of doing nothing is. What we're doing now is pretty close to nothing, and it does have a cost, in money and in more intangible dimensions (e.g. humanitarian).

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#136

Post by SoftwareMaven »

I have a very dear loved one who suffers from schizophrenia. I've seen firsthand how useless the system is. Before a diagnosis, everybody (schools, friends, etc) are judging the parents because their child doesn't fit into "norms". After a diagnosis, they have no idea how to handle it, so things don't get better.

We pushed everybody out of state hospitals (which were horrible places) but never really answered the question of where those people need to go.

Fortunately, my loved one's disease is being well treated at the moment. I constantly fear the day that a serious psychotic event occurs, especially if it occurs after she moves out of her parents house (which, like most teenagers, she really wants to do).

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#137

Post by potatolicious »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #121
potatolicious wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument irks me. Have you been on the inside of a homeless shelter? The constant bed bug invasions, bunking right next to a paranoid schizophrenic, living in constant fear of rape (yes, even for men)? Treated like a social pariah on a good day, non-existent the next? This isn't even the tip of the iceberg, I assure you. Life inside the system is not nearly as rosy as you might think. Often I feel like people sh…

Nothing in the GP post says anything about the rosiness of life inside the system.

Your post suggested that the system wouldn't scale due to fraud - the implication being that people would take advantage of the free housing being provided.

What I said was that the conditions in these institutions is so inhumanly bad, that no one in their right mind would voluntarily do it. So what kind of fraud are you thinking of?

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#138

Post by Camillo »

kyebosh wrote: post #90
debacle wrote: post #10

You can blame the schools for misdiagnosing ADHD, and you can blame them for a poor IEP, but you can't blame them for a child not having a normal life due to one of the most tragic diseases known to man. Schizophrenia is not the kind of disease you can treat with an IEP, and it sounds like the author's son fell out of the system from a very young age. Trying to blame anything but genetics and development for his son'…

> it's very unlikely that his son would have ever been a contributing member of society. I'm having trouble getting past this comment. I don't wish to malign you debacle - I'm sure you're not being malicious - but it seems like a very unkind & privileged mindset. I hope this isn't representative of the community. Paul Gionfriddo certainly doesn't consider his son to lack contribution.

> but it seems like a very unkind & privileged mindset.

You think being of sound mental health is a privilege? In Europe we think health is a right, which is why we have public health systems. It may sound a bit strange at first, but it works quite well.

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#139

Post by dasil003 »

potatolicious wrote: post #137
ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in the GP post says anything about the rosiness of life inside the system.

Your post suggested that the system wouldn't scale due to fraud - the implication being that people would take advantage of the free housing being provided. What I said was that the conditions in these institutions is so inhumanly bad, that no one in their right mind would voluntarily do it. So what kind of fraud are you thinking of?

People running shelters taking advantage of government funding perhaps? Still seems the money is too little to make much profit through fraud, but there's no shortage of bottom-feeding hustlers and slumlords to try...

Re: My son is schizophrenic. The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life.

#140

Post by woodchuck64 »

Timothy D. Wilson's "Redirect" is relevant here and shows that a significant number of treatments for all manner of childhood and young adult issues skip one crucial yet obvious step: simple scientific testing. Instead, "common sense" often ends up the preferred approach to treating problem children, usually making the problem worse.

http://www.amazon.com/Redirect-Surprising-Science-Psychologi...

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