Preventing Tragic Outcomes Starts with Us
Posted on 03/06/2010 | 1 Comments
There was a tragic story in the Halifax newspaper, the Chronicle Herald this week: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1185324.html. The story was both new and unfortunately very old at the same time. The gist of the story was that a young man who had killed a woman a number of months ago was found not criminally responsible because, as the story states: “the teen was psychotic when he killed a woman in February”.
Although there are few details of what happened in the paper, it seems as if the young man had been experiencing psychotic symptoms for some time prior to the event. Apparently, “his family had been trying to get him psychiatric help”.
What a shame. How tragic. How sad. How ironic, that Nova Scotia has one of the nation’s best first onset psychosis programs. What happened? What is the back story?
The Province of Nova Scotia spends about 3.5% of its annually recurring health care budget on mental health, and a fraction of that on child and youth mental health services. This is in spite of the knowledge that about 3/4th of all mental disorders arise prior to the age of 25 years and increasing realization that early intervention and effective treatment may prevent substantial long and short term negative outcomes and yes, maybe in this case would have prevented such a tragic outcome.
I for one am getting sick and tired of reading these stories and writing these blogs. I have decided to run for federal office in Halifax in part to make mental health a national health agenda item. This tragic case should not have happened. Why is it taking so long to do so little that can help so many so much?
--Stan
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This is a great set of comments and rings very true.
I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles. After all, scientists are human beings too! But science is different than scientists.
The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict. Science is not about finding truth. It is only about being less wrong most of the time. The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe. The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct! It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”. It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.
t does not drive our beliefs. It does however challenge our beliefs. In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context. That is one of the great features of science.
But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding. And thus it is nasty, brutish and long. As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.
By Christina Carew on May 11th
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Christina Wilson said...
Thank-you Dr. Kutcher for directing your precious time and energy to creating the needed systemic change in health care. Reactive social policy in this “have-not” province is the root of substandard mental health services. As a frontline worker in outpatient mental health with a small private practice, I am exhausted by bandaid solutions, stigma, and a sense of failure. I just sent out an invite to the Nv 5th EP conference and the link to the Sooner the Better website to every organization working with youth in the CEHHA region so I hope we get a good response.
Keep up the good work!
Comment made on August 05th, 2010
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