We all appreciate the utility of a good lawyer when we've been victimized. Even if I might quote Shakespeare's phrase 'kill all the lawyers,' I'm looking for the biggest, baddest lawyer I can find if I am wronged. OTOH we all know that litigation abuse is rampant. This is primarily a rent-seeking phenomenon. The lawyer lobby manipulates congress to make it easier to sue, and easier to win, and thus lines its pockets. The American Trial Lawyers Association earned such a bad reputation that they had to change their name (they are now the "American Association for Justice").
With little notice paid, the same thing has happened to the psychiactric profession. There's an excellent piece in the WSJ by David Kopel who points out some of the problems in the mental health industry over the last few decades:
David Kopel: Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown - WSJ.com
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Originally Posted by Kopel
A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill... According to a study released in July by the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of state hospital beds in America per capita has plummeted to 1850 levels, or 14.1 beds per 100,000 people.
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Yet at the same time, there have been efforts in recent times to label grief over the loss of a loved one as mental illness:
Good Grief! Psychiatry’s Struggle to Define Mental Illness Goes Awry | TIME.com
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Originally Posted by Maia Szalavitz
It has not gone unnoticed that the illnesses for which proposed definitions have been expanded are mainly those that are treatable by drugs — antipsychotics or antidepressants, for which manufacturers seek increased marketing opportunities — while the contractions tend to be in conditions for which no specific medication is available.
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Rent seeking has led the profession of psychiatry into a putrid morass, just as it has done to the legal profession.
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