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Comment by overkill28 | Hacker News Reader

> You send a trained mental health nurse and/or social worker to talk to them, several times a day if necessary. If they don't want to engage, you work with them to build a relationship of trust. You work with that person to get them back on a suitable course of medication, or to help them manage their symptoms and manage their life while unmedicated.

Serious question, would you be willing to do that job? For what price? For how long?

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If I were a trained mental health professional who had also been trained on emotional regulation capable of doing this job in a society where mental health professionals are equal to nurses and doctors I would definitely do this job for the salary equivalent to a nurse or a doctor. I’d be contributing to the greater good much more than my current position writing software that will never change/save lives.

You make it sound like those professionals have some magical training to withstand the abuse, the stress, the bad situations of the job.

While they do have some training, it is not possible to shake some things off easily and it does get old quick. One of the reasons why drug abuse is so prevalent in some medical communities.

The median physician salary is $217,000, and the average family doctor oversees a panel of 2,300 people, who see him or her about 20 minutes, two or three times a year.

There is not a sustainable system where workers pay taxes sufficient to afford a specially trained nurse or doctor for full time, personal care for everyone who could benefit from it.

If we don’t have social networks that shoulder burdens at what looks like an economic loss, there’s not enough paid care to go around at the levels of empathy we want.

The 2300 number is commonly cited, but more recent surveys suggest average panel size is much lower.

Recent studies of various practice settings in the United States and abroad found current panel sizes ranging from 1200 to 1900 patients per physician. For example, Kaiser Permanente reported a mean per-physician panel size of 1751 patients, and Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound reported a panel size of 1490 patients per physician.18 The US Department of Veterans Affairs reported a mean panel size of 1266 patients per full-time equivalent physician.19 One study in Canada found a panel size of 1400 patients per PCP.20 A study in Denmark found a maximum level of 1600 patients per physician,21 and a study in England found 2033 patients per solo physician.22

https://www.jabfm.org/content/29/4/496.full

You seem to imply that I'm proposing something new and radical, whereas I'm actually just describing how community mental health is practised in a lot of places, including some parts of the US.

I wouldn't be willing to work as a psychiatric nurse or a social worker, but clearly plenty of people are. There are all sorts of jobs I wouldn't want that other people love and vice-versa.

I would need some firm data showing plenty of people are willing to work with people who may pose a danger to them. Retail work is considered to be bottom of the barrel because you have to deal with the general public, I don’t see people lining up to spend years of their education to deal with mentally ill customers.

At least not without significant compensation, which we as a society don’t want to pay for, considering the piss poor pay for social workers and lack of mental institutions.

A large number of people have the job title "mental health nurse" or "psychiatric nurse". A majority of those people spend a majority of their time working with the most seriously ill people. For a high-income country, the US has an unusually low number of mental health nurses relative to the overall population; there are more than five times as many mental health nurses per capita in the UK, Scandinavia, New Zealand or Japan.

https://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/nursing_atlas_200...

It is exactly what happens in most countries here in Europe

It already exists, you don't have to invent it.

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