A father's scars | Hacker News Reader

A father's scars

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53 pointsilamont10 comments

Until my daughter was born, I didn't care about much. I didn't see it that way at the time, but it's painfully clear now. I didn't care about the self-assessed "unnecessary details" of my own life (trivial matters like insurance, savings, my health), much less broader systemic concerns like healthcare, politics and the future. I didn't _fear_ these things.

Having my daughter has made me fear, well, everything.

How our healthcare, political, and national security systems are failing us, and in fact compounding each other's shortcomings (I'm a U.S. Citizen). How we constantly fail each other as neighbors, citizens, and fellow humans in exchange for greed, or power, or whatever, with a veneer of naïveté.

I don't know what needs to be done to arrive at a system where all manner of people, no matter the challenges they face, can get constructive, effective help. And some days it feels like we're moving in the right direction. But that day can't come soon enough.

The HN community wields an astronomical amount of power and leverage in today's world. And the community is realizing too that this influence can affect more than vacation rentals. We have the tools, knowledge, and relationships to help our fellow people in bigger ways than we've yet realized. To eat this elephant one bite at a time is the only way to make situations like this man's a relic of the past.

You know, it's certainly possible to have a better mental health care system in the US. The barrier is we don't want to pay for it. Discussing this on a place like HN with a strong undercurrent of glibertarian fyigm is wasting your time and energy. See, for example, any of the threads discussing the many negative effects of the tech boom on sf; the idea that we live as part of a community and have shared responsibilities is anathema to HN.

I definitely agree that HN is first and foremost utilitarian. Which is why I have every confidence that, in the coming years, as the # of HN'ers who've reproduced grows, there will come a critical mass of folks out to maximize the outcomes for their children.

How is it utilitarian? Utilitarianism is about maximizing the usefulness for the most people. The latter is the key. A system that is great for some, but really bad on average is as from utilitarian you can get.

If you'd like to improve mental health care in the United States, forget the funding issues for a moment: instead, start with disassembling the likes of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a division of Health and Human Services which is staffed more or less entirely by "consumer/survivor"-movement flunkies and uses its $3.6 billion annual budget to oppose everything the modern medical establishment has to say about mental health and mental health care, whether it take the form of psychiatry, drugs, or outpatient treatment.

But these margins are too narrow to contain a full discussion of the matter so I'll leave continued research as an exercise to the reader. :P

> "in exchange for greed"

That's pure capitalism by design. Simply move to a more socialistic country. Having even a small safety net helps piece of mind.

> Simply move to a more socialistic country.

Why didn't anyone tell me that it was just that simple!

People immigrate/emigrate all the time.

I live in Gloucestershire, England. There's a mostly rural population of about 650,000 people. (Although Gloucester has a diverse population[1]). There are about 2,500 with a probable mood disorder like depression[2], and about 2,000 people with a probable psychotic illness.

The local Mental Health trust has about 4,000 people on the books at any time.

Only 4% of those patients will ever need an inpatient bed.

> He calls on an advocate who says that the mental-health system neglects the small percentage of people with the most serious mental illnesses. He says that such people often need 180 days to get medications to work properly, and that the average psychiatric hospitalization is five days, after which families are usually on their own to deal with a medical condition that can be as complex as cancer.

Keeping someone in a hospital against their will is problematic from a human rights point of view. It's also very expensive, and it requires some rehab work when the person leaves hospital. So while some people do need hospital and they have a right to a hospital place if that's the most effective treatment it should be possible to treat most people in the community or with shorter than 180 day stays.

It's baffling to me why US citizens tolerate the awful quality of mental health treatment in the US - where most mental health treatment is provided in prisons not hospitals; where only 3% of occupational therapists work within mental health settings.

[1] http://www.gloucestercitizen.co.uk/Barton-cultural-hub/story...

Wow, terrible situation for any parent.

> “I like to believe what Susannah said,” he says, going back to his daughter’s theory. “That when I said ‘I love you,’ that broke through. That he was still delusional, but that did break through, and the old Gus heard that. Not the old Gus — Gus.

I do wonder about this. That his idea of his son was someone who wasn't delusional. That the illness was not the "real" Gus, or even the "new" Gus but that it's some other person. I wonder about treating these things as external to the person.

I wonder if Gus thought the "real" version of himself had delusions. I never met him, but I would think you'd need to accept, on some level, that those things really are a part of you.

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