If you're going to put money toward mental health care, put that money toward improving facilities and requiring that everyone who works with mental patients have at least a Bachelor's degree in psychology.
How much of the public knows that you don't need a degree past a high school diploma to work directly with patients in a mental hospital or psychiatric unit? "Mental health technicians" are the staff who spend the most time with patients during every 24 hours at psychiatric facilities. Many of those technicians enjoy psychologically tormenting the patients until the patients get so upset that the people who tormented them can take something that the patients said or did after being provoked and write it in the patients' charts as the justification for forcibly medicating those patients, putting them in physical restraints, or just throwing them on the floor and laughing at them while their victims weep in frustration and humiliation. At more than one hospital, in two states, I have witnessed adult, male mental patients crying in those scenarios, while the people who are holding them down tell them "It never happened," whatever it was.
The public doesn't know why mental patients frequently "don't get better." It's because the system abuses them and blames their failure to improve on them.
Psychiatric nurses and psychiatrists are held to such a low standard of care that emotional abuse and neglect are the norm at every level of that system. Therapists are constrained by an insurance system that would rather medicate people than pay for counseling; you have to diagnose your clients with something or you can't get paid. There are mental health professionals who hate the pathologization of people by the system. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry really has bought the world and the training for all mental health professionals is based more every year on illness-based diagnosis and automatic medication for patients of all ages.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 10, 2016 @ 5:16 p.m.
