Comment by car | Hacker News Reader

Comment by car | Hacker News Reader

What a powerful piece, poignant in its prose.

The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe and keeps its secrets well hidden. Genetics and neuroimaging have shown how remarkably complex and interacting are the biopsychosocial causes of mental illness and that there will likely never be magic bullets. Drug companies have stopped looking for them.

This paragraph summarizes the issue of mistreatment of the mentally ill in the US perfectly:

Why is it that the rest of the developed world gets this and what makes us the laggard outlier? How can it be that the richest country in the world is most neglectful of its most vulnerable citizens? The simplest answer to this complicated question is the misplaced US faith that market forces are always the most efficient vehicle for solving problems. Adam Smith—the father of modern economics—knew better and strongly supported the role of government in providing vital public services undervalued by the market. Privatization of mental health has resulted in too much treatment for the well; cruel neglect for severely sick.

The path to improvement is a political one, lobbying the ones in power on behalf of our powerless mentally ill. We need to end their silent suffering.

>> The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe

Really? It is more complicated than the Orca brain? We aren't magic. The differences between our's and the brains of similarly-sized animals are slight. I'd say our brain isn't fundamentally any more complex than an ape's or a dogs. But if you want to compare numbers, Sperm Whales have 18-20lb brains, far larger and more complex than ours by every measurement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_35_03_05_Brain_siz...

Correlating brain size to intelligence or complexity is a common amateur mistake. Let’s for a second pretend all animal’s brains are black boxes, and we can neither see nor measure them. Instead, let us say we can only judge brains by their impact on the world. Would you then not put humans so far above the other animals as to make it almost silly to compare?

>> can only judge brains by their impact on the world.

So bacteria? Plankton has a massive impact on the world too. Insects ... the planet is arguably dominated by insects.

Mammalian brains are, plus or minus a few percent, equally as dense/complex. There are aspects of dolphin brains that are far more complex than ours. A dog's brain has far more connections dedicated to smell than ours. There is some evidence that Orca brains have similarly more connections dedicated to emotions. Each brain is tuned slightly differently, ours perhaps more to vision and problem solving, but our biology isn't any more evolved or complicated.

Our culture if toxic masculinity that equates mental illness with weakness and personal moral failure

This. Our culture says that if you don’t work you’re a drag on society and frowned upon. If you don’t work you don’t deserve insurance. If you don’t have insurance you don’t deserve to be healthy. Certain politicians would get rid of Medicaid and Medicare in a heartbeat if they could.

It’s truly disgusting.

An observation.

On the micro scale these aren't mean or bad people. A lot of people I know back home (Missouri, middle class, many of them baby boomers) follow this brand of logic and the accompanied tough-guy/cult-of-the-dollar ethos.

Not one of them applies this ruthless logic in their daily life. They are compassionate with the people in their lives, some to the point of enabling people with substance abuse problems as opposed to letting the authorities 'deal' with them.

The complexity and scale of these problems out-strips the empathy required to solve them for many people. The experiences(no health care, mental health issues, prejudice) do not match their own experiences which makes those dealing with them the 'other'.

The way to getting some traction with these problems probably lies more in bridging the empathy gap than in the solution space.

> The experiences(no health care, mental health issues, prejudice) do not match their own experiences which makes those dealing with them the 'other'.

If things keep going the way they are, those experiences will only become more relatable; not less.

I have a good, high-paying job with good benefits and even I am considering going without health insurance because I get so little from the premiums I pay. Most of my providers are out of network because all of the ones in network have 3-12 month waiting lists for new patients.

And that’s on top of the $5000 deductible — plus the fact I know if anything serious happens I’d likely have to fight with the insurance company for years and have to take out a loan to cover the treatment in the meantime (I’ve had to do this before, and conversations with others in my situation taught me I was far from alone).

Our health insurance system is officially non-functional in my eyes.

100% These situations will have to become more pervasive because we're talking about shattering identity to adopt change.

The other thing most Americans don’t realize is that many people would be financially better off paying out of pocket and taking a deduction on your tax returns.

Trump made that harder for lower and middle class workers with his “tax cut”, but it’s still viable in certain tax brackets. But something tells me that ending risk-pooling in favor of individual tax deductions is the endgame the current GOP has in mind...

given that you do not consider these good-to-ingroup-bad-to-outgroup people "mean or bad people", who do you reserve and apply that descriptor for? any examples?

A middle class dad that's anxious about not having enough cash being told consistently for years that 'others' want more of his money may be a bit selfish or lack perspective but he's not a "bad" person. The same way a substance abuser isn't a "bad" person.

Those who feed toxic beliefs/prey on folks' insecurities for personal gain, range from misguided/unscrupulous to bad.

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