I would like to think this report is a parody, but unfortunately it isn’t. It should be obvious to everyone that medical schools are nothing but indoctrination assembly lines now. And like many big companies, the consulting firms have been captured by whacked ideology. They like to do research to pimp their services. And like a lot of research supporting wild pro(re)gressive claims, this report belongs in looney-tune land for its specious, fabricated data and analysis. The report claims to focus on equity in mental health care. Of course it assumes there is a huge lack of equity, which of course is due to structural racism, and of course costs our society a fortune. Except it doesn’t. This report is simply an embarrassment.
The numbers in the report are literally just made up and are super-high to attract attention. But they do nothing to help design a truly appropriate policy to address either mental health issues and reducing disparities in treatment. And let me point out for the one millionth time that the disparities are largely caused by irresponsible behavior–if you don’t fix that behavior, you aren’t going to fix the disparities, unless you want to track everyone down to the lowest level, which is what pro(re)gressive policies do. The report claims that lack of equity in mental health treatment cost $278 billion and led to 117,000 excess deaths in 2020. There is zero support for these ludicrous numbers. Remember this isn’t the cost of treatment, this is supposed cost of lack of equity in treatment.
They claim the current cost is now $477 billion in avoidable and unnecessary costs and that it will be $1.4 trillion by 204o. (Deloitte Report) These absurd numbers are more than the US spends on mental health treatment. Somehow the supposed costs of chronic health conditions are attributed to mental health issues, completely illogical. People with chronic health illness often are depressed or anxious, but the physical health issues are causing the mental health ones, not the reverse. And there is no attribution of where there is lack of “equity” affecting any of these numbers. The disproportionate poor physical health of some minorities is exclusively attributable to their very poor health and health care behaviors, not to racism or other factors. You eat too much, you don’t exercise, you take drugs, you smoke, you drink too much–yeah, you will have more physical health problems. And morons like the ones who wrote this report exacerbate the situation by creating excuses for the behavior instead of figuring out how to change it.
As I said, the whole point of this report was to try to grab attention and get into newspapers and on TV and on social media with manifestly crazy numbers. It does nothing to help address the real problems of mental health treatment.