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Some of this is a reflection of society not wanting to confront the challenges with mental health. We went from just dumping people in asylums and ignoring issu

Some of this is a reflection of society not wanting to confront the challenges with mental health. We went from just dumping people in asylums and ignoring issues like PTSD, to acknowledging these things exist, but trying to push everything into therapy and psych evals. I think at some point we'll have to acknowledge that pscyhology is a fuzzy field and it doesn't always have the correct answers and somehow balance that with but sometimes the experts are right.

yadaeno 2y ago
The fuzzier the field, the wider avenue for corruption in the courtroom. Declaring someone competent based on the non objective whim of an "expert" can have major monetary consequences.
messiah_complex 2y ago
[flagged]
- Nursie 2y ago
  They should do economists next.
- mangotiger 2y ago
  [flagged]
tomp 2y ago
My interpretation is the exact opposite. Our society (well, the US and increasingly Europe where I’m from) has put a lot of resources and effort into mental health, largely by following “expert” recommendations. Tons of people are being treated for mental health, children are medicalised, employers offer mental health courses and insurance, people sharing experiences about burnout, language being changed to avoid offending people, … Yet the problems keep getting worse. Maybe the experts are the problem?
- nojs 2y ago
  > Maybe the experts are the problem? Or more likely, the current approach just doesn’t work very well. If everyone with a disease starts taking a medicine, and nobody gets better, it doesn’t mean the medicine causes the disease, despite the correlation. It just means the medicine doesn’t work.
  - jannw 2y ago
    maybe it's difficult to call either way
  - jtc331 2y ago
    But if, after the mass introduction of that medicine, the number of people with the disease skyrocketed, then there’s a decent likelihood the causality does actually go that direction. With other treatments for diseases we always expect the incidence rate to decline — because the treatment works. If it stayed static or went up slightly, then the treatment doesn’t work (and you’re might have slightly higher rates due to new interest in the diagnosis). But huge increases…that’d not be good.
  - tomp 2y ago
    Right, I wrote the above comment in a way that implied I blame the experts; I didn't actually mean that, by first approximation my "most likely" belief is simply that experts don't help at all. But it's not hard to come up with actual causal reasons why experts are actively making things worse: 1. if people have confidence in experts, they'll seek treatment from them, and forego other, potentially more effective, treatments (in this particular case: making and talking to friends, not therapists; prioritizing family, not shunning them; prioritizing community, not isolating; etc.) 2. experts make a living selling advice to patients, so it's in their implicit interest to keep having patients (either individually, not curing them, or society-wise, making more patients) (there's a lot of anecdata about "I asked a therapist how many patients they actually cured, and they looked at me bewildered") 3. I've seen some opinions, which echo mine, that experts seeking, reaffirming, and reminding patients of their "traumatic experiences" might hurt more than it helps (e.g. talking to therapist every week makes you re-live your traumatic experience; narrowing the definition of "consent" and convincing women they've been raped; convincing children they're trans (they used to be called "tomboys!"); in general marking fairly normal life experiences - job loss, job stress, death in family, etc. - as "traumatic" and "requiring therapy") probably more
EasyMark 2y ago
I don't believe that anyone would sign off on this if they'd actually read it. I doubt this bill was about mental health and America's court system's love of pseudo science quackery; this includes stuff like bite marks, lie detector tests, multiple personalities, "recovery" of repressed memories from decades before, etc. This bill was to show that these lege members pass things they haven't read, often I can't really blamed them because the bills are thousands and thousands of pages long and often contain multiple completely different amendments having nothing to do with the bill.

yadaeno 2y ago

The fuzzier the field, the wider avenue for corruption in the courtroom. Declaring someone competent based on the non objective whim of an "expert" can have major monetary consequences.

messiah_complex 2y ago

[flagged]

Nursie 2y ago
They should do economists next.
mangotiger 2y ago
[flagged]

tomp 2y ago

My interpretation is the exact opposite. Our society (well, the US and increasingly Europe where I’m from) has put a lot of resources and effort into mental health, largely by following “expert” recommendations. Tons of people are being treated for mental health, children are medicalised, employers offer mental health courses and insurance, people sharing experiences about burnout, language being changed to avoid offending people, … Yet the problems keep getting worse. Maybe the experts are the problem?

nojs 2y ago
> Maybe the experts are the problem? Or more likely, the current approach just doesn’t work very well. If everyone with a disease starts taking a medicine, and nobody gets better, it doesn’t mean the medicine causes the disease, despite the correlation. It just means the medicine doesn’t work.
- jannw 2y ago
  maybe it's difficult to call either way
- jtc331 2y ago
  But if, after the mass introduction of that medicine, the number of people with the disease skyrocketed, then there’s a decent likelihood the causality does actually go that direction. With other treatments for diseases we always expect the incidence rate to decline — because the treatment works. If it stayed static or went up slightly, then the treatment doesn’t work (and you’re might have slightly higher rates due to new interest in the diagnosis). But huge increases…that’d not be good.
- tomp 2y ago
  Right, I wrote the above comment in a way that implied I blame the experts; I didn't actually mean that, by first approximation my "most likely" belief is simply that experts don't help at all. But it's not hard to come up with actual causal reasons why experts are actively making things worse: 1. if people have confidence in experts, they'll seek treatment from them, and forego other, potentially more effective, treatments (in this particular case: making and talking to friends, not therapists; prioritizing family, not shunning them; prioritizing community, not isolating; etc.) 2. experts make a living selling advice to patients, so it's in their implicit interest to keep having patients (either individually, not curing them, or society-wise, making more patients) (there's a lot of anecdata about "I asked a therapist how many patients they actually cured, and they looked at me bewildered") 3. I've seen some opinions, which echo mine, that experts seeking, reaffirming, and reminding patients of their "traumatic experiences" might hurt more than it helps (e.g. talking to therapist every week makes you re-live your traumatic experience; narrowing the definition of "consent" and convincing women they've been raped; convincing children they're trans (they used to be called "tomboys!"); in general marking fairly normal life experiences - job loss, job stress, death in family, etc. - as "traumatic" and "requiring therapy") probably more

EasyMark 2y ago

I don't believe that anyone would sign off on this if they'd actually read it. I doubt this bill was about mental health and America's court system's love of pseudo science quackery; this includes stuff like bite marks, lie detector tests, multiple personalities, "recovery" of repressed memories from decades before, etc. This bill was to show that these lege members pass things they haven't read, often I can't really blamed them because the bills are thousands and thousands of pages long and often contain multiple completely different amendments having nothing to do with the bill.