some New Freedom Commission on Mental Health recommendations adopted

[wli]

The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has had some of its recommendations adopted for the 2005 federal budget. The article focuses on financial considerations of pharmaceutical companies, and is not informative regarding which of the recommendations were adopted.

Some of the recommendations are as follows:

The final report to the president, on page 11, says
"Service providers across settings will also routinely screen for co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders." This suggests mental health screening is recommended to be used in tandem with drug screening typically required for employment.

A Report on the Public Comments Submitted to the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, on page 21, quotes a rather "interesting" comment, from an anonymous source (as are all quoted comments):
"Involuntary commitment laws must be more broadly interpreted so that those who are unaware of their illness can be brought into care. Here, access is being denied because people "choose" not to receive it. The "system" has been hiding behind this preposterous notion of "choice" too long. Mental illness can destroy a person's ability to make appropriate choices for their own care."

The countervailing comments in the immediately preceding section (page 20) of the report on public comments are rather soft-pedaled. They reflect none of the typical concerns of civil liberties advocates regarding involuntary commitment and none of the concerns about politically-biased and racially-biased selective enforcement. Rather, they portray it as a source of fear that scares people away from treatment.

[hiley]

1. lovely

:argh:

[Trillo]

2. It's about a huge database from which, ultimately, to mine $$$.

If someone isn't harming anyone, then under these new concepts, they can be "committed", and of course, someone pays.

What Freedom?

[rodeodance]

3. my fear is this will focus on potential drug abuse--and the law will

be brought in (given this administrations track record).

......The final report to the president, on page 11, says
"Service providers across settings will also routinely screen for co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders."

[wli]

5. I interpreted that as a method of implementing mandatory screening

That is, when mandatory drug screening for employment happens, so will mandatory mental health screening.

I don't know whether this recommendation was adopted.

[Trillo]

6. If I was going to place a "greatest single danger",

it would have to be that it's based upon the concept of preemption, ala Minority Report, though that fiction takes it to the extreme of preemption of murder only.

[wli]

7. the largest danger I foresaw was political bias

i.e. that the questionnaire may incorporate such things as are found in politicalcompass.org, particularly the authoritarianism portion. It would probably be difficult to justify most of the rest of the questions on politicalcompass.org, though I'd be unsurprised if attempts to veil questions apropos of other sections of that questionnaire were made.

[wli]

4. the victims of involuntary commitment may be required to pay

I don't have sources for this offhand, but from reading around the net and other anecdotal sources, I've gathered the following:

Insurance companies have very sharply curtailed mental health coverage after the 1980's where they found extremely questionable diagnostic and treatment practices to be widespread in psychiatry, and as a result, the burden of paying for involuntary commitments has often shifted to the person who's involuntarily committed. Mental health coverage is now often either absent or of much shorter duration than it was before the 1980's.

As where mental health coverage does exist it's more often sharply time-limited. Coercive imposition of courses of psychiatric medication often exceeds these limits, as do recommendations for the durations of courses of treatment in general.

These involuntary commitment scams are extremely damaging not only to those coerced into mental health treatment, but also those legitimately in need of and desiring treatment who are denied adequate insurance coverage as part of the insurance industry's response to them. (This is something of a response to my own critics on DU who claim that I "go too far" with my various disparaging remarks about the practice of psychiatry.)

[bananas]

8. A lot of vets with PTSD will be locked away

out of sight, out of mind.

[wli]

9. so THAT'S Bushler's plan to "support our troops"

Pretty despicable.