Although attention to equity and justice in mental health interventions has increased, programs for early psychosis continue to replicate inequities. Pagdon and colleagues explain in their 2024 paper that preventative interventions for psychosis have historically been studied less frequently than for other mental health challenges. However, the Recovery After Initial Schizophrenia Episode initiative (RAISE) led to the creation of hundreds of coordinated special care (CSC) programs for early psychosis since 2008. These scholars outline how the lack of diversity amongst clinicians in these programs has maintained disparities in treatment, even with federal support and funding.
āCSC outcomes remain inadequate and inequitable,ā the authors write. āSecondary analyses of RAISE data have revealed that all primary benefits of specialized services, compared with treatment as usual, accrued mainly for individuals in the top socioeconomic status quartile. Worldwide data indicate treatment as usual, accrued mainly for individuals in the top socioeconomic status quartile.ā
Although these programs were intended to help clients of all socioeconomic backgrounds, they primarily benefited those already better positioned in the long run.
Pagdon and colleagues argue that without meaningful integration of diverse perspectives and a commitment to addressing structural inequities, these programs will continue to fail the communities they were meant to serve. The authors call for systemic changes, including diversifying the mental health workforce and ensuring that underrepresented voices are not only included but empowered in the development and implementation of psychosis treatment.
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What is the point in any social attempt to manage mental health when society itself has become a confused hotchpot of insanity, absurdity, vampires, goons, clowns, tricksters and fiends of every variety, all these produced through the destructive social conditioning and a stupid, brutal and violent social environment that is imposed on once perfect, healthy, happy and in most cases inwardly free young human beings. You call this growing up – I call this the destruction of our children and the enslavement of their twitching corpses by a social process that’s destroyed the Earth and all our children’s futures. So what are we saying again about psychiatry? Society itself has gone insane, and no psychiatrist can blame that madness on the brain which rather is driven mad by an insane, vampiric society of extractors and exploiters reaching you with a million hands, through your emails, on the advertisements, dominating your minds and culture, popping through the letter box from so many faceless companies, which are facades for vampiric grifters – this is the dead dry leaves of nothingness our lives have turned into. And for this we have destroyed a once perfect, total, harmonious living system called Mother Earth, which was OUR Earth. We never consented to it being divided up and sold off to the vampires that destroy us. So come on fellow human being – surely you can see that the only hope is in grasping this stinging nettle with me. I don’t know why we won’t do it. Because only in the true, clear and undimmed perception of all of this is there hope, because then there is radicalization, and a transformative seriousness that will make things happen, finally. A psychosis can help you to do this, but psychiatry and society never will. They are one and the same disease after all, one that is manifestly catastrophic and fatal for us all.
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No-one – there is more truth contained in this comment than in everything else I have seen, heard, or read in the last month combined
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