Comment by esseph
8 days ago
What if they're the same levels of mental health issues as before?
Before we'd just throw them in a padded prison.
Welcome Home, Sanitarium
"There have never been more doctors, and yet we still have all of these injuries and diseases!"
Sorry, that argument just doesn't make a lot of sense to me for a whole, while, lot of reasons.
It is similar to "we got all these super useful and productive methods to workout (weight lifting, cardio, yoga, gymnastics, martial arts, etc.) yet people drink, smoke, consume sugar, sit all day, etc.
We cannot blame X or Y. "It takes a village". It requires "me" to get my ass off the couch, it requires a friend to ask we go for a hike, and so on.
We got many solutions and many problems. We have to pick the better activity (sit vs walk)(smoke vs not)(etc..)
Having said that, LLMs can help, but the issue with relying on an LLM (imho) is that it you take a wrong path (like Interstellar's TARS the X parameter is too damn high) you can be detailed, while a decent (certified doc) therapist will redirect you to see someone else.
>What if they're the same levels of mental health issues as before?
Maybe but this raises the question of how on Earth we'd ever know we were on the right track when it comes to mental health. With physical diseases it's pretty easy to show that overall public health systems in the developed world have been broadly successful over the last 100 years. Less people die young, dramatically less children die in infancy and survival rates for a lot of diseases are much improved. Obesity is clearly a major problem, but even allowing for that the average person is likely to live longer than their great-grandparents.
It seems inherently harder to know whether the mental health industry is achieving the same level of success. If we massively expand access to therapy and everyone is still anxious/miserable/etc at what point will we be able to say "Maybe this isn't working".
Answer: Symptom management.
There's a whole lot of diseases and disorders we don't know how to cure in healthcare.
In those cases, we manage symptoms. We help people develop tools to manage their issues. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Same as a lot of surgeries, actually.
As the symptoms in mental illness tend to lead to significant negative consequences (loss of work, home, partner) which then worsen the condition further managing symptoms can have great positive impact.
Psychology has succeeded in creating new disorders while fields like virology, immunology and oncology are eradicating and improving mortality rates.
It was these professions and their predecessors doing the padded cell confinement, labotomising and etc.