Back in mid-February, Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.) trumped the addition of $15 million for mental health first aid training that was passed in a $1.1 trillion spending bill. Sadly, Barber also connected the funding to helping stop future instances of mass shootings — a connection that simply has no basis in reality. But hey, at least he’s doing something.
This past week, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, announced $30 million to help research into brain trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He also promised last year to hire at least 10,000 veterans and military spouses over the next five years.
Which do you think is doing more to help mental health? Government or private citizens & industry?
Imagine that in a world where thousands of new studies are published every year, and hundreds of studies are conducted on any one condition, that one gleaming, gold-standard study has the ability to completely determine the course of treatment for one condition. For decades.
Virtually across the board of medicine and psychiatry, doctors will constantly and consistently oversell the benefits of a given treatment, and undersell the risks and side effects of it. This may not be as surprising when you look at some of the key factors into how medical and psychiatric treatment is learned and then conducted on patients.