Marcus,
Forgive me if I am entering this party late, but what exactly means “mental illness” I would expect that mental illness is massively underdiagnosed in this country, and especially in the blue collar mid-west where it is considered a taboo topic and people have not had adequate health insurance to use to diagnose it. So, is a young person who hears voices, but who integrates those voices into a well-organized and effective life mentally ill? Is the homeless person who prefers to sleep on a subway grate than go into a shelter mentally ill? I had a colleague once who famously checked himself into a mental hospital making a vague claim to hearing voices and then, once on the ward, behaved absolutely as he would have otherwise. His only aberrant behavior was that he constantly took notes. Explaining that he was doing a study of the ward. When, after a few weeks, he got bored of it and tried to check himself out, he could not get out! He had to use his “fail-safe” (the chairman of his department, if I remember) to extract himself. Was he mentally ill? Is trump mentally Ill? WAS he mentally ill before he became president? Or was he promoted to his level of mental illness. (CF, Peter Principle.) <https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Principle-Things-Always-Wrong/dp/0285631764> (In a political hierarchy a politician will rise to his level of insanity.) (cf, All the Kings Men <https://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=All%20the%20kings%20men&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20> , a fabulous novel, by the way). Not clear to me how a libertarian of any stripe can allow the concept of mental illness into a conversation. A mentally ill individual is one whose behavior is so annoying that other individuals are willing to cooperate to put him away? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2019 11:44 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Statistical poser (aka fact checking is hard) Robert writes: “Estimates vary by source, but fraction of opioid deaths that are suicide is around 20-30%” What I’d really like to know is how the fraction of opioid deaths occur with individuals that have no historical sign of mental illness at all, and would be described by their friends and colleagues as effective and engaged prior to their initial prescription. I would expect that mental illness is massively underdiagnosed in this country, and especially in the blue collar mid-west where it is considered a taboo topic and people have not had adequate health insurance to use to diagnose it. I strongly suspect a structural cause of all this is the idea that free will exists, combined with the inevitable evolution of the economy toward more automation. Millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions of people, have what amounts to a mistaken view of the world. Similar arguments apply to the ongoing outbursts of gun homicide (instead of suicide). Marcus
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