NIMH
Article
NIMH is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2022 and February 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “But NIMH says 20% of all Americans have mental illnesses”; “NIMH’s “mental illness” or “serious mental illness””; “Dr. Steven Hyman of NIMH”. It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 23, 2022
- Last seen: February 08, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 1978 (1 shared issues)
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- 2016 essay (1 shared issues)
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- Abbott (1 shared issues)
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- Abstracted Will Of The American People (1 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- Alabama (1 shared issues)
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- Albert Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- Alyssa (1 shared issues)
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- Alyssa Vance (1 shared issues)
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- Amsterdam (1 shared issues)
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- Amsterdam City Council (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
LA County Jail has 15,000 inmates; the largest psych hospital in the country has 1,400 patients. So if 10% of LA jail inmates had mental illnesses, this would beat the hospital. But NIMH says 20% of all Americans have mental illnesses, and 6% have serious mental illnesses. Is the definition of “mental illness” Shellenberger is using here closer to NIMH’s “mental illness” or “serious mental illness”? He just says “mental illness” and doesn’t explain.
But he cites a book called Bedlam, which itself cites a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center. Do they mean something closer to NIMH’s “mental illness” or “serious mental illness”? You can find more information at my linked essay, but the short answer is that TAC describes itself as looking at “serious mental illness” but their definition is somewhat different from NIMH’s and probably not commensurable with it.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because prisoners aren’t fully representative of the general population; just to give one example, they tend to be young, and young people from 18-25 have (as per NIMH) a 10% serious mental illness rate. That means that even if prisoners are no more likely to be seriously mentally ill than the general 18-25 population as per NIMH, Shellenberger’s “more mentally ill people in LA County Jail than in every hospital in the country” statistic is true!
Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes. In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, Michael Roe points out that one of these mysteries solves the other: If there were single gene polymorphisms with large negative effect, they would get selected out of the population ... eventually. Which suggests that there can't be high-frequency mutations with large negative effect, unless there is some compensating advantage (like, e.g. giving you resistance to malaria). Which leaves us with multiple mutations, each of which individually has a small effect, adding up to a large total effect. And mutation-selection balance, where random mutations are introducing harmful mutations at about the same rate the natural selection is removing them. If there were genes of large effect, evolution would have removed them. So all that can be left is genes of small effect. And the only way genes of small effect can cause a common and severe condition is if there are so many of them that they add up to a large effect. (Dr. Steven Hyman of NIMH made the same point recently on Psychiatry at the Margins) So many of the traits we’re most interested in - intelligence, strength, schizophrenia, etc - are necessarily massively polygenic, because one side of them is better for fitness than the other. If they were monogenic, evolution would have already selected for the good side, and there would be no remaining genetic variance. The remaining question is: why are there still even these genes of very small effect? Here are three possible answers: Evolution hasn’t had time to remove all of them yet. Because a gene that increases schizophrenia risk 0.001% barely changes fitness at all, it takes evolution forever to get rid of it. And by that time, maybe some new mildly-deleterious mutations have cropped up that need to be selected out.
Inline links: Michael Roe points out, made the same point