Do People Like Their Mental Health Care?

Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took the SSC survey to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 – 10 scale.

About 5,000 people answered. On average, they rated their experience with psychotherapy a 5.7, and their experience with medication also 5.7.

This is more optimistic than a lot of the horror stories you hear would suggest. A lot of the horror stories involve inpatient commitment (which did get a dismal 4.4/10 approval rating) so I checked what percent of people engaging with the system ended up inpatient. Of people who had seen either a psychiatrist or therapist, only 7% had ever been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Note that this data can't tease out causation, so this doesn't mean 7% of people who saw an outpatient professional were later committed – it might just mean that lots of people got committed to the hospital by police, then saw a professional later.

Going into more detail about what people did or didn't like (note truncated y-axis):

I asked people what kind of therapy they did. People liked all schools of therapy about the same, except that they liked "eclectic" therapy that wasn't part of any specific school less than any school. Every school including eclectic got higher than 5.7, because people who wouldn't answer this question – who weren't even sure what kind of therapy they were doing – rated it less than any school or than eclectic therapy.