Healthcare innovation and the digital madhouse gulag effect

I spent the day hanging out with healthcare innovators, entrepreneurs and investors at the Innov8forhealth Business Expo at the Northern KY University METS Center, a beautiful conference center across the river from Cincinnati. I really enjoy these events. It’s an occasion for me to improve my own work, and an opportunity to compete with other startup ventures for the attention of investors and healthcare system buyers. As I have written before, healthcare is now a galaxy.  At the center is a black hole where everything that happens is mandatory and payment is by and large measured in bulk on a population-served basis. A little farther out is a ring of fee-for-service places, the Primary Care Zone. Out beyond that is the realm of health...

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Building a life despite tough symptoms

Barbara Altman’s memoir of a life affected by mental illness, set in the latter half of the twentieth century in the American Midwest, tells about what many people experience. Trauma is connected with substance abuse and is embedded in family life. Accomplishments also play out in intimate settings: homes, schools, churches and workplaces. Ms. Altman’s book tells the story of a someone who faced challenging mental health issues but still discovered meaning and success, and a life of grace, service and dignity. Ms. Altman writes about her life from childhood to the middle of her sixth decade. She tells of a difficult home life centered around an alcoholic father. She experienced her father’s harsh temper, and possibly worse. At age 15, Ms....

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Sorry, Brian Williams, “disgusting horrific criminal” didn’t make the DSM-5

If every grieving widow has a place in the DSM-5, why not Ariel Castro? I saw some of Castro’s remarks at his sentencing. He seemed completely disconnected from the standard world. His behavior was out of bounds, abnormal, inexcusable and, to use a word favored by some within mental health advocacy community, he appears to have anosognosia of the criminal type. If madness has a spectrum, Castro has a place within it. I’m glad to see some awkwardness around labeling Castro. It gives us an opportunity to consider the negative effects of labeling anyone as anything. --- The picture below is by Malaika Puffer, from her blog "Sort of just a person" Even well-intentioned diagnostic labeling can hurt. ...

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Is your mental health expert smarter than a second year college student?

If we took what we know about how mental illness plays out in the world and let some second-year college students work on fixing it, would we end up with something better than what people experience today? Today’s experience of mental illness, such as it is, developed through accretion. It is a mishmash of good and bad intentions, a clump of attitudes and practices, a basket of  traditions, economic and political factors, plus choices made since time immemorial. We have “cures” that include home remedies, scripts for talking with people, and manufactured pills and potions. We have “lifestyles” that include disempowerment, isolation, poverty, broken families, unemployment, poor health, even death. What if we told our students to start...

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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness in America

One of my favorite books is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. It’s about the herd behavior of humans: fads and crazes and financial market follies. It covers witch trials, alchemy, superstitions. The book also covers the 17th Century “tulip bubble,” when flowers were currency, more valuable than gold. The lesson in the book is that once the populace gets convinced of something that turns out to be plain wrong or completely irrational, bad things happen. People die at the stake. Awakening to the realization that your tulip bulb investment is as worthless as a sack of onions is no picnic either. There are signs that the world of mental health is in the midst of this sort of wake-up....

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Our Grand Inquisitor says you can’t have treatment

Are states using targeted auditing to disrupt mental health services? New Mexico used a recent audit to completely de-fund 15 mental health providers serving the bulk of the state’s publicly funded mental health care. Some 30,000 individuals have had their care interrupted. A number of for-profit and nonprofit providers are closing because they cannot maintain operations while fighting the proposed findings. Although the state’s actions are authorized by law, they were not mandatory. There’s no public access to the allegations within the audits. The audit findings are secret. Similar events are playing out in North Carolina. According to newspaper reports, a 2012 Public Consulting Group audit that cost North Carolina $3.2...

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Company owner Has to have a Enterprise Worth

Enterprise Worth Businesses certainly are a essential part of every single enterprise business deal. They need to end up being conducted by the reliable Enterprise Worth Organization for a lot of essential causes that is to be reviewed more. The business enterprise Worth Organization utilised also needs to be considered a alternative party to guarantee objectivity in the worth. Furthermore reviewed will probably be common main reasons why a business person need to get a enterprise worth and also things that make a difference benefit.There are numerous main reasons why a business person has to have a enterprise worth. Virtually any enterprise business deal will be needing any worth advance to be able to rationalize the particular...

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