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Delonte West, sad


BurntOrange&White

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2 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

it's sad, but Delonte has been a lost cause for a long time. i'm honestly surprised he's still alive. when you have the demons he has, and you live in this country where there isn't a modicum of actual, 21st century, first world mental healthcare, well...that's a wrap. 

I promise you Delonte has access to any mental healthcare he needs.  A big part of being mentally ill is you often run from help.  It’s brutal and there’s no easy solutions.  Hope Cuban can help.  Sad.  

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even so, what passes as "quality" mental health care today is still trash. mental healthcare has never been a big priority in this country, and what i would call "real" help does not exist yet. not for 99% of us anyway. maybe the Cuban money will make the difference, but i still have doubts about the efficacy of any mental healthcare that's available anywhere in the world.

side note- Americans suffer from mental health disorders at an alarmingly high rate. plenty of  other first world countries really don't even have mental health problems, like Germany for example. Americans need more mental health services than anyone, and yet good mental healthcare, which requires a team of attentive, specialists/doctors + a willing and able patient, is very, very hard to come by.

edit: one example- a psychiatrist should be your doctor for life, the same way your pediatrician is your doctor until you outgrow him/her. i can't even count how many psychiatrists i've had because of two main reasons- 1)soooooo many of them have an overbearing God complex, and won't listen to or even trust their own patients, and 2)pretty much all of them have way too many patients for it to even be possible for them to remain attentive to each ones needs. it's a fucking shit show. 

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12 hours ago, shadow_operative said:

even so, what passes as "quality" mental health care today is still trash. mental healthcare has never been a big priority in this country, and what i would call "real" help does not exist yet. not for 99% of us anyway. maybe the Cuban money will make the difference, but i still have doubts about the efficacy of any mental healthcare that's available anywhere in the world.

side note- Americans suffer from mental health disorders at an alarmingly high rate. plenty of  other first world countries really don't even have mental health problems, like Germany for example. Americans need more mental health services than anyone, and yet good mental healthcare, which requires a team of attentive, specialists/doctors + a willing and able patient, is very, very hard to come by.

edit: one example- a psychiatrist should be your doctor for life, the same way your pediatrician is your doctor until you outgrow him/her. i can't even count how many psychiatrists i've had because of two main reasons- 1)soooooo many of them have an overbearing God complex, and won't listen to or even trust their own patients, and 2)pretty much all of them have way too many patients for it to even be possible for them to remain attentive to each ones needs. it's a fucking shit show. 

I agree with you but you clearly state willing and able patient as a big need.  You can throw all the resources you want but that's a big rate limiting step.  And I agree with all your other points.  

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9 hours ago, dingleberryswitzer said:

^^ so my Aunt is a psychiatrist and she's in her early 60s and probably has a ton of money , so I asked her when she was thinking about retiring.  She said not any time soon, there's way too many people that need help.  She might work until she dead the way it sounds.  

I love what I do and there's always work.  I can just do the corporate side or sit on my ass but I love it.  I will work 'for fun' for a decade plus.  Good on. your aunt.  Need more people in medicine because they like it, and not just because they need to do it for money. 

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I was going to post what Twicehorn said about the availability of mental health care, but then I thought more about what Derka said and he’s right. The cost of mental healthcare is out of reach for most Americans. And it’s even worse than that.

Most of the mental healthcare community operates like a physical therapist, slowly providing help so that patients have to come back over and over for long periods of time to milk their clients of as much money as possible. It’s shameful and as a country we should be able to do better.

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7 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

I was going to post what Twicehorn said about the availability of mental health care, but then I thought more about what Derka said and he’s right. The cost of mental healthcare is out of reach for most Americans. And it’s even worse than that.

Most of the mental healthcare community operates like a physical therapist, slowly providing help so that patients have to come back over and over for long periods of time to milk their clients of as much money as possible. It’s shameful and as a country we should be able to do better.

We can actually both be right.

Part of the problem is simply that we don't have many "answers" to mental health "questions."  Much of it remains a mystery. 

State of the art treatments are mostly hit or miss and are expensive simply because it's going to take a lot of visits to the psych and therapist to get it worked out, if it ever gets worked out.  And, frequently, a magic bullet medication "cocktail" loses its efficacy over time.

Your implication in the second paragraph that PTs or psych professionals do this intentionally for profit is wildly unfair.  It's the nature of the "disease."

While the US poured whatever state-run mental health resources it had down the drain several decades ago, it's not a whole lot better anywhere else.  The nature of mental health care, and mental health patients is such that public health just isn't well adapted for care.  And private isn't a whole lot better.

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3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

While the US poured whatever state-run mental health resources it had down the drain several decades ago

True - The US shuttered most of the psychiatric hospitals across the country after the 80s because they were costly to state budgets (true) and because we were told that patients could easily transition to less restrictive (and less costly) placements in the community, such as halfway houses or independent living arrangements with sufficient wraparound services.  A lot of mental health advocates also complained that these psychiatric hospitals were inhumane and "we shouldn't be locking people up because they're mentally ill" (paraphrased).  So most of the hospitals were closed and those few that are left are wildly underfunded in decrepit buildings (go visit Vernon or Terrell State Hospital at some point) with staff that are privatized (for those who don't know, privatizing is a disaster in this kind of work) and considered dinosaurs. 

Unfortunately, those promised community placements never really materialized because states didn't want to fund them either so community mental health for the seriously mentally ill is piecemeal with little follow-up by qualified mental health staff making sure that the Delonte Wests of the world are taking their meds, aren't living in a dumpster, and actually working.  So we're left with unfortunate folks like West, who will very likely at some point do something that lands himself in jail for a long time (or worse).

 

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2 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

True - The US shuttered most of the psychiatric hospitals across the country after the 80s because they were costly to state budgets (true) and because we were told that patients could easily transition to less restrictive (and less costly) placements in the community, such as halfway houses or independent living arrangements with sufficient wraparound services.  A lot of mental health advocates also complained that these psychiatric hospitals were inhumane and "we shouldn't be locking people up because they're mentally ill" (paraphrased).  So most of the hospitals were closed and those few that are left are wildly underfunded in decrepit buildings (go visit Vernon or Terrell State Hospital at some point) and considered dinosaurs. 

Unfortunately, those promised community placements never really materialized because states didn't want to fund them either so community mental health for the seriously mentally ill is piecemeal with little follow-up by qualified mental health staff making sure that the Delonte Wests of the world are taking their meds, aren't living in a dumpster, and actually working.  So we're left with unfortunate folks like West, who will very likely at some point do something that lands himself in jail for a long time (or worse).

 

Yep.  There's little doubt that asylums and mental facilities were horrific.

But there's also little doubt that the "community treatment" model has been a failure.  Mostly because underfunded, but it is also naive about the mentally ill.

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“LOL at the snowflakes that believe @KingJames could even last 10 seconds with me! If that coward had the balls or the ability to kick anyone’s ass, Delonte West would’ve lost his teeth long before his meth habit!” Covington wrote on Twitter on Monday night.

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I have to say good on Mark Cuban for stepping up and helping West get his life in order. It is going to take a whole bunch more work and encouragement and love for Delonte to be in a consistently good place, but I am glad he is receiving help. I hope at some point down the road he can be an advocate for those in need of help with their mental health. 

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13 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

I have to say good on Mark Cuban for stepping up and helping West get his life in order. It is going to take a whole bunch more work and encouragement and love for Delonte to be in a consistently good place, but I am glad he is receiving help. I hope at some point down the road he can be an advocate for those in need of help with their mental health. 

Yep, this has been one of the better stories of 2020.     Really happy that Cuban stepped up and went and got him.    

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my personal opinion, based on my own life with mental illness- it is simply not the time to be mentally ill, and i have serious doubts as to whether or not i myself will live to see the day where mental illness has been destigmatized, and when there will be even adequate care available for those with mental illness. i could go on about this topic forever, but for the sake of brevity, i'll pretty much leave it at that. West is an example who shows that, even with lots of money of and serious support behind you, there's so little understanding and legitimate help available that, if your mental illness is severe enough, you're simply fucked. you just are.

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Tragic. Antipsychotics are terrible medications. The side effects often times are worse than the illness from the patient’s point of view. They don’t always control the psychoses even and patients will hear voices telling them to stop taking them. 

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A lot of truth in this thread. I've struggled with mental issues, both genetic and environmental, since I was a ute and know that day by day is the best I can hope. To your point @shadow_operative, there may yet be a day in our lives where society has a handle on the issues. Sure, we'll likely be in rockers, but we'll get good meds. Had we been born 50 years earlier we would have been living in the Cuckoo's Nest, so small steps. I'm hopeful that science and further enlightenment of the general populace will keep advancing the acceptance and understanding.

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