Devon Kurtz @dkurtzz

When someone poses a clear threat of violence to themselves or others but can't seek help, what can society do? Just leaving people with severe mental illness to deteriorate on the street, as many cities do, isn't compassion. It's cruelty. There is a better option: a process called involuntary civil commitment. @dkurtzz explains what it is and how it works.

Meanwhile, serious mental illnesses don’t typically develop until late teens/early twenties. The VAST MAJORITY of youth—literally ~95%—will NEVER go on to develop a debilitating mental illness. All the youth mental health attention is both directly and indirectly harmful.

J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 @JDHaltigan

4 days ago

Youth mental health has become a boutique identity industry which no longer addresses questions regarding psychopathology characterizing individuals. Rather, it glamorizes personality idiosyncrasies leading to narcissistic self-expression abetted by diagnostic shopping.

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My brother in Christ, I have read it in Greek. Have you?

🐧 Tāwhaki the Penguin God🐧🦞 @TawhakiTheGod

a week ago

@SpencerKlavan Have you read one or more of the following translations? - Lattimore - Fagles - Fitzgerald If the answer is "no" then your opinions will be ignored.

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The headline… Buried 18 paragraphs below.

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Street homelessness is not simply a housing problem, and approaches that pretend it is are doomed to fail. @dkurtzz explains why: “There are some individuals who are primarily poor, and their main challenge is finding housing security. But that’s not a lot of people who live on the street ... "

What can a vintage refrigerator tell us about capitalism? Quite a lot, actually! Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx

Do you believe in the American experiment? Join Cicero. Work with us to reform broken systems and renew the spirit of America's founding. We're recruiting graduate students (JD, MA, PhD) and early-career researchers (0-3 years of experience) for our Law & Policy Fellowship. It is part-time, includes a generous monthly stipend, and starts in September. Apply below:

Very good news in Raleigh today. Several governors have vetoed key homeless bills this year. It’s great to see a legislature with the power to push back. Communities deserve clean parks and safe shelters. This bill works towards both.

Speaker Destin Hall @ncspeakerhall

2 weeks ago

It’s clear that @NC_Governor isn’t committed to keeping NC’s streets safe or to improving outcomes for the homeless community. The legislation he vetoed provides long-term solutions by relocating encampments to safer, more suitable locations. The House will override and right

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It’s clear that @NC_Governor isn’t committed to keeping NC’s streets safe or to improving outcomes for the homeless community. The legislation he vetoed provides long-term solutions by relocating encampments to safer, more suitable locations. The House will override and right this wrong.

"Mental health is NOT the same thing as serious mental illness." How is America's approach to mental illness broken, and how can we fix it? Cicero's @dkurtzz explains:

I wrote about this paper, and the long-running empirical debate about the effects of decriminalization in Washington and Oregon, for the @CityJournal SS: substacktools.com/sharex/vLJSGj68

Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman

3 weeks ago

Yet another paper finds that decriminalizing drug possession in Washington and Oregon caused an increase in overdose deaths. "Synthetic-control estimates show that both decriminalization regimes sharply reduced drug arrests and were followed by sustained increases in overdose

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America's first public psychiatric hospital predates the American Revolution. Virginia built it in 1773. Francis Fauquier, the Royal Governor who proposed it, wanted to help "a poor unhappy set of People who are deprived of their senses and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their fellow creatures," adding that "Every civilized Country has a Hospital for these People." The building, originally known as the Publick Hospital, was later reconstructed and still stands in Colonial Williamsburg. Institutions like the Publick Hospital were created to provide dignified, humane care for people with severe mental illness, rather than neglecting them into homelessness and incarceration. These institutions sometimes fell far short of that optimistic vision, to say the least. But they emerged out of a real need that is still with us today, and their history can teach us about America's current approach to mental illness. For America's first 200 years, states had full discretion over how to provide for those with serious mental illness – and that discretion allowed care to evolve with changing scientific understanding, medical standards, and social mores. Then, in the 20th century, the federal government stepped in. The National Institute of Mental Health spent the 1950s and 60s pushing states toward "community care," using research that was never actually tested in communities – it was just extrapolated from hospitals and assumed to translate. Congress then built an entirely separate federal system to replace state hospitals. As a result, states lost 432,633 psychiatric beds between 1955 and 1981. By 2016, only 20,000 non-forensic beds remained nationwide, down from 50,000 in 2005. Meanwhile, the number of mentally ill people living outside has climbed 30% since 2005. In a new paper, @dkurtzz examines the history of state and local involvement in treatment for serious mental illness – and what has gone wrong since the U.S. abandoned it:

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Why are homelessness activists "training providers to manipulate definitions and terminology in an attempt to upend and work around the new federal requirements," rather than ditching their failed ideology? At @CityJournal, @Hopestreetco examines HUD's pivot away from Housing First (and the activists resisting it at all costs):

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Pleased to announce we closed @8vc Fund 7; $1.5B capital to partner w/ top talent in this US-led AI Industrial Revolution! Productivity, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, et al. We are too busy crushing it to make a new video; what an exciting time in the innovation world! 🇺🇸

8VC @8vc

a year ago

We are proud to announce 8VC Fund VI, with $998 million in new LP capital to back the most fearless and ambitious builders. The world is broken. Let's fix it. To the frontier!

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It's rare to see billionaires get credit for their principled public policy work. This protest brought together activists, crackheads, and citizens to celebrate @JTLonsdale's years upending homeless policy in the US. Here I am at the shrine to Joe. Truly a beautiful event.

Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale

4 weeks ago

Protesters held an event in my honor outside @InstituteCicero last night. There was food, letter writing, chants with my name, even a song! Your activism makes me blush. Sorry I missed the serenade - next time! I'll never stop fighting for the homeless and sanity in our cities.

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Protesters held an event in my honor outside @InstituteCicero last night. There was food, letter writing, chants with my name, even a song! Your activism makes me blush. Sorry I missed the serenade - next time! I'll never stop fighting for the homeless and sanity in our cities.

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Here’s one reason: Americans have become pathologically overtherapized and obsessed with our mental health. We’re spending way too much time thinking about ourselves as individuals, what’s wrong with us, what we don’t have, what other people are doing to make US feel bad—were NOT spending time thinking about what we can do to make others lives better, or actually doing things, which can help us appreciate what we ourselves have.

Brad Wilcox @BradWilcoxIFS

4 weeks ago

We are in the midst of a "happiness crash" 250 years after Thomas Jefferson enshrined “the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence: "By almost every measure, Americans are losing that pursuit. The U.S. depression rate is near record highs. The World Happiness

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The good news is: since school-based mental health programs are ineffective and problematic, schools can feel great about focusing on simply teaching kids to read and do math again! Educating kids and keeping schools reliably safe and orderly are the most important things the education system can do for students’ mental health—being able to read and not having to worry about violent classrooms are very good for well-being.

J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 @JDHaltigan

4 weeks ago

School-based mental health interventions & SEL that prioritize & hyperfocus on emotions & feelings have been a disaster for young people. They are reverse-CBT. They pathologize normal developmental experiences.

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The mental health industry is so insanely counterproductive that it's literally trying to create a new mental health awareness program to counter the negative effects of another mental health awareness program. JUST STOP DOING THE FIRST MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS PROGRAM.

TheLegalProcess (v3.0 | Instruction Not Therapy) @ALegalProcess

4 weeks ago

As I was saying…mental health awareness programs are not harmless. This is so well-documented that researchers have moved on to developing protocols to counteract the harm, even as they debate the specific mechanisms causing it.

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For years, mental health awareness efforts have driven me insane. These efforts are COUNTERPRODUCTIVE. Here's EXACTLY why mental health awareness doesn't work: Mental health awareness is a tool of the public health model. The public health model has been the dominate approach for trying to reduce rates of mental illness for more than a half-century. Public health models aim to prevent disease in the few through broad population-level programs, rather than treating the few who become ill once they do. Disease prevention is attempted by: raising awareness about the disease, educating the public about it, and screening everyone for it. All these public health model prevention programs are done for the same purpose: to get as many people into treatment pre-emptively or early who wouldn't have sought treatment otherwise. Upstream treatment, in theory, would effectively prevent the disease. We've now been doing all this preventative public health model stuff for DECADES, but no mental illness has been prevented. Why?? We still don't know the causes of mental illness, so we DONT ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO PREVENT IT. And even if we DID, we DON'T HAVE mental health treatments that are curative OR preventative. They simply manage symptoms. How and why, then, did we even start doing this ineffective public health model stuff like mental health awareness?? Before this model took over and made everyone think they had ADHD and Anxiety Disorder, the primary approach was to treat active cases of mental illness. Mental illness, 100 years ago, was a FAR NARROWER concept--mostly meaning what we today call "serious mental illness." Serious mental illness is best represented by schizophrenia. We're talking about functionally impairing, chronic, degenerative disorders, often with psychotic symptoms. Serious mental illness only affects ~5% of the population, even though we constantly hear "more than 20% of people have a mental health condition." That includes people with mild anxiety, or depression after a grandparent dies, or post-divorce distress. Mild and moderate conditions. Then, in the early 1900s, a movement of progressive social reformers came to believe--but NEVER proved--that serious mental illness was caused by distress from normal life challenges and bad social environments (poverty, divorce, poor education, etc.). These reformers were inspired by the public health model, recently popular after the success of sanitary reform. Telling the whole population to wash their hands and practice good personal hygiene prevented a ton of disease. Maybe, these reformers thought, encouraging people to practice good MENTAL hygiene would prevent everyday distress and, subsequently, would prevent serious issues like psychosis from developing. These reformers encouraged good "mental hygiene" as meaning public health style efforts: raising awareness of mental illness, educating the masses on well-being (that is, avoiding normal distress inherent to human life), giving entire communities pre-emptive psychosocial interventions, and even engaging in political activism for more govt assistance. A century has passed, and the mental hygiene movement still dominates, though it was rebranded "mental health" after mental hygiene got entangled with eugenics. Everything these reformers wanted has happened: - access to mental health treatment has been expanded indiscriminately at the population-level and made widespread: half of all Americans will receive a mental health diagnosis in their lifetime now - a variety of "mental health" professionals provide pre-emptive psychosocial treatment through schools, workplaces, and community mental health centers - public schools education children about emotions and mental states so they might recognize early signs of a "mental health condition"--which, remember, includes NORMAL DISTRESS--and report those negative emotional states for possible treatment - mental health awareness efforts mirror these education efforts, teaching and normalizing mental health conditions and treatment, encouraging it positively for all. We're VERY aware of mental health now: the DSM, a clinical tool, is an amazon bestseller - we screen basically EVERYONE for mental health conditions, starting at younger and younger ages, even though there are no biomarkers, brain scans, or blood tests to confirm whether someone's anxiety is simply because they lost their job or is pathological Where has that left us? Mechanically, as an EXPLICIT GOAL of the public health model, we've seen more people report distress, get diagnosed, and get treatment. This WILD overpathologization has become PERVASIVE in American society. But who is better off??? Not the general public, who have not seen any ROI in the form of lower prevalence rates from prevented disease--or even better life satisfaction. By contrast, the "worried well" have made themselves actually sick by thinking so much about whether or not they're POTENTIALLY sick, even though the vast majority of us are simply NORMAL unhappy humans, ALL of whom are unhappy and stressed at baseline to at least some degree, by nature of being human. And the truly mentally ill, the most seriously mentally ill, have been abandoned to deteriorate and strain every public system--ERs, homeless services, jails, prisons, nursing homes... So much emphasis has been on providing superficial supports to the "worried well" in order to prevent disorders we don't know how to prevent, and so little has been on treating those who need intensive interventions. That is why spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on public-health-style "mental health" efforts like mental health awareness, rather than serious mental illness, doesn't work, and drives me totally insane.

Matthew Schmitz @matthewschmitz

4 weeks ago

Mental health awareness is hurting mental health. compactmag.com/article/stop-t…

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