“The Obama Plan — Spending Mental Health Money in All the Wrong Places “

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Allen Frances writes about Obama’s $235 million investment in a new mental health system, in the Huffington Post; “Most of the kids singled out (and stigmatized) by the early warning system will be ‘false positives’ — not really at risk for violence or mental illness and much better left alone to mature out of their problems. And most future mass murderers will be ‘false negatives’ — completely missed by the broadly cast net. And attempts at prevention and early treatment are likely to increase the already rampant overuse of inappropriate medication in children.”

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Of further interest:
Obama’s proposed budget to seek $235 million for new mental health programs (Washington Post)

4 COMMENTS

  1. “We can’t take 12 years training Doctors and Post-Docs to meet the need in 2014.”

    Great. With the dismal failure we already have, even With 12 years of training, now we’re supposed to start producing 90 day Wonders to man the DSM Billing Codes?

    Read the Performance Audit Memo at the end of this post which I jpg-ed from a San Francisco Community Mental Health Center:

    http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/2010/11/rams-cultural-crapulence-in-san.html

    This place was holding $16.3 Million in SF DPH contracts.

    It’s not an aberration. It was a National Training Center for Racially Preferential Psychologists.

    And yet we need to buy even More of this?

    According to the Daily Beast SF topped the list of American Cities for number of Psychiatrists per person.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/03/11/americas-25-craziest-cities.html

    If that CMHC is the best ‘Mental Health’ has to offer in a near Perfect Psychiatric Petrie Dish, then it’s time we De-Funded the entire scam because it’s obviously working at cross purposes to its stated objectives.

    $16.3 Million and they couldn’t even diagnose a Performance Objective from Administrative Code.

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  2. “Second, it will likely wind up doing much more harm than good for the kids who are identified as being at risk for mental illness.”

    “I really can’t imagine the content of the training programs. There is nothing to teach — no proven way of detecting early signs of mental illness in children and no proven way of preventing it.”

    “And attempts at prevention and early treatment are likely to increase the already rampant overuse of inappropriate medication in children. Many, if not most, of the kids identified will have no more than self-limited developmental or individual differences. But many will get unnecessary and potentially harmful treatment.”
    Thank you for these lines and for your overall opposition to more unsientific “treatment” in the form of pretending that we can predict what children are likely to experience in the future and then pre-emptively make that experience better with drugs that in terms of clear proven effects – have only harmed. That said, I encourage you to consider that what you advocate for in your last paragraph may be the same flawed paradigm of “care” which you critique – just in physical settings other than schools.

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  3. Mr Benson;

    “the ‘CONTENT’ of the training programs”?

    I assume you’ve read the SF Performance Audit Memo?

    http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-san-francisco-theyre-after-every.html

    The game, as it were, is simply to drag Every Child in SF they can catch into their Disability and Drug consumer for life program they can get their hands on.

    This, is the brutal reality of a Government Jobs Program.

    It’s funded BY Government, approved BY Government, and allowed to continue, BY Government.

    (And as you’d expect, the originals of those SF Mental Health Board meetings, At, SF City Hall, are no longer available at their original addresses.)

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  4. Our children are the geese that are going to lay the golden eggs for years to come for the so-called “mental health system.” They will be turned into permanent patients at an early age and will spend their entire lives in the system; if they live that long. This is disgusting, immoral, unethical, and inhuman! And the sad thing is that the American public will accept this hook, line, and sinker for the sheeple that they truly are. Parents will allow the destruction of their children without a question asked, especially if they can get disability for the child at an early age!

    This is the other fact that no one is looking at. With more and more people being put on the Disability rolls the Medicare and Medicaid system will literally hemmorage to death. It’s already hemmoraging with the daily addition, seven days a week, of over 1000 people per day on Disability just from the “mental health system” alone. Where is the money going to come from to pay for all the people that will be disabled due to this scheme.

    I’m beginnint to think that this is a not so subtle attempt at social control of very large numbers of people.

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