Comment worse ... (Score 1) 422
It;s a worse problem that Piketty wanted a certain conclusion, and a segment of the world wanted that same conclusion so badly that it accepted his drivel.
One of the big problems is that anti-psychotic drugs have severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects. (Many of them cause severe weight gain, often enough to lead to diabetes.)
Sure, but the problem is that the illnesses themselves are dangerous.
Suicide attempts are dangerous. Running off, doing and believing weird things is dangerous.
It's not safe to just not treat these illnesses. It's the fallacy of the false alternative, to believe that we could choose to just not treat them and avoid the problem of side effects.
Your comment is completely misinformed.
From the National Institute of Mental Health:
Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.
I don't have the figures for 2004, but I do have the figures for 2012 regarding homelessness. From the US Department of Housing and Urban Development:
On a single night in 2012 there were 633,782 homeless people in the United States[...]
Dividing by the US population in 2012 (312.8 million), we get 0.00202615728, or, 0.2%
So 26.2% of Americans are mentally ill, and 0.2% of Americans are homeless. So no, it's not a "positively idiotic statement." The mentally all are all around us, and perhaps the reason the study can't pin down why they're dying younger is because people are under the impression that you can easily spot someone who's mentally ill. Yeah, a lot of homeless people are mentally ill. But about a quarter of everyone is mentally ill, and trying to put the mentally ill into a box means that most of those people will go untreated because they'll be ashamed of their disease.
Pretty much by definition, the severity of a mental illness is measured by the degree of impairment to your life.
So let's not conflate the large numbers of people diagnosed with relatively mild degrees of mental illness with the seriously mentally ill. The seriously mentally ill are quite disproportionately homeless, unemployed, dependent upon others, etc.
The inability to manage one's own affairs and to get along with others is, not surprisingly, detrimental to other aspects of health.
Certainly, psychotropic medications can have some pretty serious side effects.
On the other hand, they are used to treat very serious illness. Many of the symptoms of mental illnesses are dangerous. As with all medications, there is a trade off between the benefit of the medication and the detriment of the side effects.
The meds you mention, Thorazine and haloperidol, are pretty old school BTW. These days newer atypical antipsychotics would usually be tried first.
If the name doesn't ring a bell to younger Western audiences (and not to be confused with an Asian supermarket chain, apparently), it is now part of Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK):
And? Plenty of heart disease research is funded by makers of heart medications.
In addition to the poor choices associated with irrationality
Some interesting reading: Peter Kramer's Against Depression.
California doesn't regulate the prices of electric vehicles: they require that either 1% of vehicle sales be zero-emission, or that the car manufacturer buy zero-emission credits.
Nobody is forcing Fiat to build an electric car, and nobody is forcing them to sell that car at a loss.
That doesn't make any sense.
"Nobody's forcing you to pay protection money. You could just let Guido here break your legs."
Does this mean that we will need to find some other means of energy rather than burning dead dinosaurs? God forbid.
Yes, nuclear. Let us know when you're ready.
The US is so heterogeneous that you have to look at different groups, or you are just being stupid.
What hath Bob wrought?
