Podcasts Technology Astral Codex Ten Podcast Do People Like Their Mental Health Care?

Do People Like Their Mental Health Care?

Published: July 14, 2019, 7:37 a.m.

Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took\xa0the SSC survey\xa0to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 \u2013 10 scale.\xa0

About 5,000 people answered. On average, they rated their experience with psychotherapy a 5.7, and their experience with medication also 5.7.

This is more optimistic than a lot of the horror stories you hear would suggest. A lot of the horror stories involve inpatient commitment (which did get a dismal 4.4/10 approval rating) so I checked what percent of people engaging with the system ended up inpatient. Of people who had seen either a psychiatrist or therapist, only 7% had ever been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Note that this data can\u2019t tease out causation, so this doesn\u2019t mean 7% of people who saw an outpatient professional were later committed \u2013 it might just mean that lots of people got committed to the hospital by police, then saw a professional later.

Going into more detail about what people did or didn\u2019t like (note truncated y-axis):

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I asked people what kind of therapy they did. People liked all schools of therapy about the same, except that they liked \u201ceclectic\u201d therapy that wasn\u2019t part of any specific school less than any school. Every school including eclectic got higher than 5.7, because people who wouldn\u2019t answer this question \u2013 who weren\u2019t even sure what kind of therapy they were doing \u2013 rated it less than any school\xa0or\xa0than eclectic therapy.

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