https://rollcall.com/2026/01/14/hhs-cuts-2-billion-in-mental...

Damage still done, people.

The damage being done here will be long lasting, not only due to the employees and clients impacted, but due to the impact on the broader business environment as well.

Until now, the government was viewed as a reliable business partner in these industries, and it definitely won't be viewed that way going forward: the chill on investment will be felt for many years to come.

In some ways, I'm starting to view this and related executive funding cuts as a sort of miniature debt default.

As someone in the industry, I agree there are too many therapists and therapy businesses right now, and a lot of them are likely not delivering value for the money.

However, I know how insurance companies think, and if you want to see people get really upset: take a group of people who are already emotionally unbalanced, and then have their health insurance company start telling them they have to talk to an LLM before seeing a human being for therapy, kind of like having to talk to Tier 1 support at a call center before getting permission to speak with someone who actually knows how to fix your issue. Pretty soon you're seeing a spike in bomb threats.

Even if we pretend someone cracks AGI, most people -- at least outside of tech circles -- would still probably prefer to talk to humans about their personal problems and complain loudly if pressured otherwise.

Maybe if we reach some kind of BladeRunner future where that AGI gets injected into a passingly humanoid robot that all changes, but that's probably still quite a ways off...

However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.

Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.

When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.

Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.

What is more often ignored is the potential for harm creation imposed by the measurement process itself: after all, such externalities are subtle and hard to quantify, even if they may ultimately sum in total to a larger quantity, potentially yielding a net positive harm overall.

Some would likely argue that we should prioritize the known over the unknown, but I'd rather not sign up my kids to be your guinea pig, especially if you have already demonstrated yourself to be a rotten scientist.

There was never much evidence for such diagnostic categories, and I was told that if you look at notes from old proceedings of the DSM-III committee that their inclusion was an artifact of the political need to get buy-in from the then-powerful psychoanalytic groups at the time.

The ICD11 plan to have a single personality disorder bucket makes more sense to me. At its core, a personality disorder consists of a heavily reinforced and entrenched cluster of behavior that is significantly self-defeating and that actively resists common intervention strategies. From that perspective, you could either have endless personality disorder categories or a single category that summarizes the phenomenon.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9881116/

I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.

If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.

If you're nihilistic and believe all employers are rotten, then jumping ship every 2 years might be a decent game strategy, but I tend to believe that good employers do exist and are just somewhat rare. So if you find a unicorn, I would recommend holding onto it.

At the time, I remember finding that frustrating, but in retrospect I think it was the right approach. Why? Because invalid reports are always going to vastly outnumber valid ones, in part because it is easy to be judgmental about someone else's parenting for a variety of prejudicial reasons, so "innocent until proven guilty" should be the default stance of any agency tasked with investigating such reports.

That is why stories about shaken baby syndrome are so galling, because the faux-science sets up a "guilty until proven innocent" scenario, which is definitely the wrong approach.

However, most professional boards are created with an explicit mandate to promote efficacy and competency, which makes a hypothesis like "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)" rather troublesome for a professional board to rally around. Even if true, it seems out of scope.

The "more DEI = more efficiency && competency" hypothesis seem like it should be where a professional board should focus its efforts and messaging instead.

This is not always stated explicitly, but will turn up in board minutes if you have access to them. Many professional boards have added a DEI committee or incorporated language into their mission statement in recent years as well (Oregon bar statement: https://www.osbar.org/diversity/programs.html).

I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is "more DEI = more efficacy && competency," or whether the hypothesis is "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)." The former hypothesis at least seems more testable, but I'm not sure whether anyone is trying very hard (meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/tbm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/tbm...).

One of the biggest obstacles you face when bootstrapping is that you need employees to grow your revenue, but you need revenue in order to pay your employees. It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem, which sweat equity can help to solve, at least to a limited degree: grant some sweat equity that vests over 5 to 10 years as a form of deferred compensation, then hope that your new employee / business partner boosts the value of your remaining equity in that time-frame by some multiple that is much larger than than the value of the equity you are giving up today. Then everybody wins.

I have found this approach very successful in my own business. It also increases the likelihood that when you want to retire some day that your own employees might be able and interested in buying you out, which means that you won't have to shop your medium sized businesses to private equity groups or search funds in 20 or 30 years when you want to get out of the game.

Part of building a middle class is not pulling up the ladder after you, which means you need to aim to enrich others -- specifically others who are not already wealthy -- alongside yourself.

Just try to avoid judging the lifestyles of others.

Yes, antibiotic resistance is a concern if you start handing out antibiotics like candy, but if PANDAS is truly as rare as everyone would have you believe, then prescribing antibiotics to every kid that comes in with a PANDAS profile is not going to move the needle much with regard to global antibiotic resistance.

Alternatives:

Prescribe them anti-psychotics or some other medication to sedate them?

Likely much higher side-effects and risk profiles than antibiotics.

Send them to a therapist in hopes that the therapist can behaviorally condition that aggression away?

Bad news: talk-therapy for aggressive behavior in children has terrible outcomes. Most likely scenario in the mental health system is that they end up in an intensive group treatment setting somewhere with other aggressive children, learn more sophisticated aggressive behaviors, and gradually get worse.

On the other hand, antibiotics have a fairly low risk profile. Some pediatricians do literally hand them out like candy when kids come in with an ear infection or sore throat. Maybe stop prescribing antibiotics for those kids, tell them to try some tea tree oil or some other natural remedy, and save the antibiotics for the kids who fit a PANDAS profile instead?

These kids are are more of an ugly and inconvenient truth that the medical world would prefer to ignore, so these kids get chucked over the wall to the mental health system instead, which is better prepared to simply lock them up and quarantine them from the rest of society.

For the most part, I think doctors want to work mostly with helpless and grateful children, who willingly submit to tests and follow orders, not angry, aggressive children who claw and bite you no matter what you do or say. If you don't "behave" then medicine doesn't want you. Go see a shrink.

This is part of why I hate the term "behavioral health," because the emphasis is on restoring compliance. There was a movement in the 90's to rebrand "mental health" as "behavioral health" in order to make it seem more reputable and science-y, but I think that move back-fired. I think we delivered more compassionate care when the emphasis was on trying to some notion of a person's healthy subjective mental state, rather than trying to get them to behave.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.8805...

I was at a psychiatric conference once where the presenter highlighted that the last condition that psychiatry actually "cured" was neurosyphilis, an infection-triggered version of schizophrenia, back in the 1940's.