[narrator]

The suicide rate measures death from mental illness. The death rate from mental illness has been steadily increasing. Therefore we are doing a bad job at treating and preventing mental illness. What other statistic would you like to use to measure how good of a job the mental health profession is doing? There have been several prominent speeches from professionals in the field who don't handwave away problems talking about the need for more analysis of what's gone wrong.

[modwest]

Literally every individual thing you wrote is wrong.

1. Suicide rate doesn’t “measure death from mental illness.”

2. The suicide rate isn’t “the death rate from mental illness.” (See #1)

3. What do you even mean by “we are doing a bad job”? Who is “we” there? Also, this “conclusion” you’re drawing is supported only by nonsense predicates (see #1 & #2).

4. The “mental health profession” isn’t responsible for moderating the suicide rate. Also literally every mention you make of “mental health profession” is fallacious because the suicide rate is not an actual metric for evaluating the efficacy of the “mental health profession”, so even addressing anything you’re saying about “measuring how good of a job the mental health profession is doing” would be legitimizing a nonsensical claim. This one covers how pretty much everything else you wrote here is wrong.

[narrator]

You just say the first proposition is false without any reasoning to back up why and without providing any better alternative. You're sticking your head in the sand and trying to ignore the problem by saying ignorance is better than any empirical approach to measuring the quality of the mental health profession.

It seems, by failing to provide any alternative, that you're saying that it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of the mental health profession as a whole? This decline is similar to how the economics profession has concluded that it is impossible to measure the success of any economic policy vs. any other because of all the confounding factors as Paul Romer has commented on extensively. This leads to methodological poverty. You can make up whatever policy or treatment you want. It's as good as any other whether it causes people to kill themselves at a higher rate or not or leads to lower or higher economic performance. It's all the same without metrics.

[whydoibother]

You’re ignoring the material conditions of people since 2000. The steady decline of that is more likely to do with suicide rates than failures of psychiatry.

[drcoopster]

While it might be valid to frame suicide as death from mental illness, how can you say that the death rate from mental illness has been increasing when we don't even really know the size of the population with mental illness. A lot of mental illness goes unrecognized.

I would argue that the problem is in recognizing mental illness and connecting those affected to the appropriate mental health professionals.