Hospital or homeless shelter ?

Copy_Cat wrote:[quote="Copy_Cat"
Are hospitals often abusive to keep people out or something ? are meds just cheaper then helping people ? whats going on ?

Yep. An inpatient stay can be over a thousand dollars a day. Compare that with a simple prescription and you've got your answers. It's all about the moolah.

Cheze2 wrote:

Copy_Cat wrote:[quote="Copy_Cat"
Are hospitals often abusive to keep people out or something ? are meds just cheaper then helping people ? whats going on ?

Yep. An inpatient stay can be over a thousand dollars a day. Compare that with a simple prescription and you've got your answers. It's all about the moolah.

I think its more complicated than that, here is in blue font is something I read where the author did a bit of math on the moolah,

Psychiatrists have become enthralled with diagnosis and medication and have given up the essence of their profession – “understanding the mind,” Carlat reports in his book.

Back in December 2003, a study in Psychiatric Services on “financial disincentives” for psychotherapy noted that psychiatrists could earn about $263 an hour doing three 15-minute “medication management” sessions, verses about $156 for a 45 to 50-minute therapy session, representing a pay cut of close to 41% per hour for doing therapy only.

The most common excuse given for the high rate of prescribing psychiatric drugs is that talk, behavioral, cognitive or other forms of non-drug treatment cost too much. However, in 2008, more than $24 billion worth of antidepressants and antipsychotics were dispensed. “Such expenditure would employ 240,000 psychotherapists earning an annual income of $100,000 to provide 6 million hours of psychotherapy averaging 25 client-hours a week,” Murray estimates.

These figures do not include what would be possible using the additional revenue generated by the sales of antianxiety, hypnotic, and psychostimulant drugs, he says.

http://pubrecord.org/nation/7955/psychopharmaceutical-industrial-complex/

I bet the amount spent just on psychiatric services for people with 'mental problems', usually alcohol, and homeless problems that “Such expenditure could buy a house for every last homeless person in America”. Copy_cat guesses.

There were about 643,000 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons nationwide in January 2009. About two-thirds of those stayed in emergency shelters or used transitional housing programs, with the remaining living on the street in abandoned buildings or other areas not meant for human habitation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States

Copy_Cat wrote:However, in 2008, more than $24 billion worth of antidepressants and antipsychotics were dispensed. “Such expenditure would employ 240,000 psychotherapists earning an annual income of $100,000 to provide 6 million hours of psychotherapy averaging 25 client-hours a week,” Murray estimates.

There is a modified version of this experiment going on in the UK at the moment, in a Government scheme to increase the number of people receiving talking treatments for depression and anxiety.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improving_ ... _Therapies

Over a million people have been enrolled, 680,000 people completed treatment, and the claimed 'recovery' rate is somewhere around 50% (according to the Government).

There's also evidence that the scheme produces results even if people are getting treatment over the phone.

And it's all highly controversial.

The three main problems are:
(1) What is being offered is a rigid form of CBT, which is undermining more subtle forms of psychotherapy.
(2) As a UK psychotherapy body says: "The theory is based on positive psychology which, after a brief surge, is now receiving sustained criticism. In effect, if we follow the happiness line, we will be saying to people 'If you are not positive, if you're not happy, if you're unemployed, if you have an illness - then this is your personal failing - there's something wrong with you'. Good contemporary psychotherapy tackles both the personal and the collective or social aspects of emotional distress."
http://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/article1488.html
(3) Lots of people have doubts about how 'recovery' is defined by the Government.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years. I would say it's not generally popular with anti-psychiatry campaigners here.

It's an example of how replacing meds with psychotherapy sounds good on paper, but does not necessarily produce the scheme you might want.

A person that does not have mental illness and or is not a mental health professional (That's me) but has real empathy looks at the above comments differently. The original statement is -HOSPITAL or HOMELESS SHELTER-?, why can't their be another way? Many people with mental illness picked a easier way to come to terms with their mental illness, they became homeless living on the streets. These people picked a way of living that did not have the pain and suffering and experimentation and false hope etc...

Who are we as a society to tell and or force people with mental illness to live their lives by our standards....???

KINDNESSTHERAPY wrote:Who are we as a society to tell and or force people with mental illness to live their lives by our standards....???

agreed.