Florida cut $100M from its mental hospitals – chaos followed • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by Sanddancer » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 12:39 AM UTC

Keverw wrote: post #53

madelinecameron wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your purview of mental health starts and stops at ADD/ADHD, you aren't really qualified to write off all of psychology.

They sit around a table voting on stuff to add to the DSM... You sit with them for like 10 minutes and "Oh you're bipolar." No MRI or blood test... The same people who said being gay was a mental illness. So why trust a industry promoting hate and still promoting ADHD which was admitted as being a work of fiction. There's a group called Citizens Commission on Human Rights that made documentaries on the subject which…

The CCHR is a Scientology shill group, and is about as full of shit as 10 pounds of manure stuffed in a 5 pound bag. So yeah, all those videos you watched are done by the same people who believe that your problems are caused by Xenu and blown up aliens.

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

#82

Post by Keverw » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 12:43 AM UTC

Sanddancer wrote: post #81

Keverw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sit around a table voting on stuff to add to the DSM... You sit with them for like 10 minutes and "Oh you're bipolar." No MRI or blood test... The same people who said being gay was a mental illness. So why trust a industry promoting hate and still promoting ADHD which was admitted as being a work of fiction. There's a group called Citizens Commission on Human Rights that made documentaries on the subject which…

The CCHR is a Scientology shill group, and is about as full of shit as 10 pounds of manure stuffed in a 5 pound bag. So yeah, all those videos you watched are done by the same people who believe that your problems are caused by Xenu and blown up aliens.

Yeah, Scientology seems a bit extreme. Apparently, they get in a really hot sauna for hours to cleanse and it sounds really unsafe to me. But besides them being part of Scientology, I do think they make some valid points.

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

#83

Post by jmcgough » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 12:56 AM UTC

tn13 wrote: post #63

jmcgough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When mental health services are cut, the burden doesn't go away but gets picked up by police and hospitals, who aren't properly equipped to handle those challenges. The SFPD and ambulances spend massive amounts of time responding to emergencies involving mentally ill homeless, which limits their ability to respond to other problems.

My question was what is the total cost of Florida's mental hospitals and if that is worth it. Assuming that $100M cut was a 10% cut it means that the total expenditure could be $1B. Which looks ridiculously high for merely 20M population of Florida. Of course there is a whole point of whether government ought to spend some money now to avoid spending on basic services later whether there are proper studies done and i…

The article states that, at its highest, the annual expenditure was about 420M, so this is nearly a 25% cut in spending. Florida also ranks 49th in spending for mental health services [1], spending less than 1/3 annually per person than the average state. They also have the third highest percentage of mentally ill and uninsured people in the country.

To put this in perspective, Florida spent over $2.2B on its corrections system in 2014 [2].

[1] http://www.fpi.institute/floridas-provision-of-mental-health...

[2] http://reason.org/files/florida_prison_reform.pdf

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

#84

Post by Broken_Hippo » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 12:58 AM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #59

newman314 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health should not be for-profit. Such a system puts the needy at a tremendous disadvantage. Needing a heart transplant etc. does not put one in a situation to shop around. Blind worship of a free market can lead to some pretty obscene outcomes.

> Health should not be for-profit. Yeah, it should be public like Canada, where I've been on a waiting list for 2 years just to get a family doctor... I think there's some middle ground there. The market does solve certain problems.

I live in Norway and am covered by the state insurance. I lived my first 30+ years in the states. I have a family doctor that I can change twice a year: Some doctors are busy and can't get you in for minor stuff the same day, but I had that in the states as well. Folks here can go to a private doctor if they choose, and they pay a bit more - but that isn't common.

The wait times are sometimes an issue that needs improvement, but overall the quality of care one has access to is greatly improved. I'll no longer have to be faced with putting off surgery because I can't afford the co-payment, nor afraid of being injured and not affording physical therapy. And this is with insurance.

Here there are ways to get things quicker if the situation is urgent, but there it really was dependent on money. The yearly payments top out at an amount that is less than the deductible I had in the states... and my insurance wasn't bad there. I'll take the universal care and wait times any day.

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

#85

Post by Broken_Hippo » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:06 AM UTC

Keverw wrote: post #74

nameless912 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is an inconsolable bipolar wreck without therapy and medications, go fuck yourself. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.

They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry. 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on t…

Go out and learn about what happens in mental hospitals. My ex was schizo-affective, and I've spent some time in some of the hospital wards and the system and stuff. If a child or adult was there because of something like ADHD, it wasn't the sort of thing you are describing. Folks there are generally dealing with things that the rest of us couldn't imagine going through properly - as attested by your attitude. Severe depression, anxiety, bipolar, severe addiction, and other such things needing actual medical oversight.

Are there horrible people practicing? Sure, but that is society at large. Most of the folks helping others want to help. Like everything else, we hear these stories because they are outliers. Some things Are subjective because we don't have the medical tests yet and we have to go by what the patient is willing to describe... but yet, if you give the wrong sort of medicine, it reacts badly. This still happens in "regular" medicine as well when we don't have proper diagnostic tools available. When we know more and have definitive tests widely available, we can do these things you describe.

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

#86

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:14 AM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #71

will_brown wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but sometimes there is no money to spend, and that's my point...it is purely a budget issue not a political one. When your State budget goes from say $70B down to $60B (including a stimulus package from the federal government) and the state is already $200B in debt where does the money come from? Had the republican (turned independent, turned democrat) governor Crist known saving $5.5M would cost $5.5B he wou…

Where do you get that money? I bet you could shake $100M out of the prison system if you looked for cases of people being locked up for ridiculously trivial offenses. Given how prisoners often cost $40-60K per year, wouldn't take that many. I don't expect people to be psychic, but common sense must apply here. When you "save money" by slashing budgets on road repairs, and ten years later your roads are so awful you h…

Indeed; the length of a political term and the length of the consequences of some of the decisions being made during that term are at odds. Is there a better solution?

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

#87

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:31 AM UTC

__jal wrote: post #44

cloudjacker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a political party in florida have anything to do with florida's budget on defense spending states don't spend any money on defense sounds like you had something to say, but got lost along the way

Perhaps. Or perhaps you are choosing to interpret my words in a way that leads to a silly result. The much more obvious reading starts with noting that the party ruling Florida is the same party that also happens to have policy positions that are of a piece at the local, state and national level positions.

Is that the party that invaded Libya? I get confused, on account of the two "big" ones seem identical to me.

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

#88

Post by mhuffman » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:40 AM UTC

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #40

I was about to wonder aloud why there can't be more private, for-profit mental health facilities instead of private prisons, as huge swathes of the incarcerated population are very mentally unwell and probably do need to be in custody but would likely benefit tremendously from a less oppressive setting. Surely there could be some profit to be extracted by privatization there. Then I realized it's because they couldn'…

Also a lot of voters seem to think that mental health issues are "your problem" but crime (getting caught with weed mostly, is a social problem that needs severe punishment, not treatment.

People (especially tea-baggers, like Rick Scott) seem to like hurting others more then helping others, all things being equal. All things being unequal, they prefer to profit off of others!

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

#89

Post by Keverw » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #85

Keverw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably some real mental illnesses but probably much less than actually listed in the DSM book. I just think the industry is quick to give people pills and the people who write the DSM have financial ties to the industry. 3,000 people a month die because of psychiatry. We don't ever hear about these victims. There was a court case where a psychiatrist testified and was questioned about what tests he ran on t…

Go out and learn about what happens in mental hospitals. My ex was schizo-affective, and I've spent some time in some of the hospital wards and the system and stuff. If a child or adult was there because of something like ADHD, it wasn't the sort of thing you are describing. Folks there are generally dealing with things that the rest of us couldn't imagine going through properly - as attested by your attitude. Severe…

Yeah, maybe I just witnessed some bad things when I was younger about this industry, which I kinda wish I would forget. Being in rural Ohio, they were probably more desperate for money but from what I find online it seems to not be isolated. Just something I never really been comfortable talking about and bottled up inside.

This world is a really screwed up place. Some people took their kids to like 3 different places just to get meds to zombify them so they don't have to be parrents and actually watch their kids. Or some put their kids in mental hospitals to try and scare them. It just really makes me sad and I feel like they're doing more harm than good. At least some of the places locally I know of got a bad rating like average of 2-3 stars. Some of this stuff is just too close to home.

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

#90

Post by nibs » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 1:49 AM UTC

happyslobro wrote: post #11

Stuff like this has happened in recent history in Canada too. At the federal level, and the BC provincial level. All in the name of fiscal responsibility, as if people existed for the sake of money, and not the other way around. It's too bad that the people who founded the country didn't lay down some sort of law against a (then colonial) government sabotaging itself. We even have a vestigial British governor general…

Same thing happened in Toronto as the former mental hospital near Allen Gardens in the East End by Cabbagetown was essentially disbanded. A lot of people stayed in the area and can still be found there to this day (it was at least a decade ago, trying to find a media link...)