Your Mental Health Records are for Sale

NBC News reports:

Sensitive mental health data is for sale by little-known data brokers, at times for a few hundred dollars and with little effort to hide personal information such as names and addresses, according to research released Monday.

The research, conducted over two months at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, which studies the ecosystem of companies buying and selling personal data, consisted of asking 37 data brokers for bulk data on people’s mental health. Eleven of them agreed to sell information that identified people by issues, including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, and often sorted them by demographic information such as age, race, credit score and location.

I wonder if it is time to give up on privacy. We have some medical privacy laws, but they are an ineffective nuisance.

Mentally ill people are a big drain on our society. If they could be more readily identified, they could be monitored for criminal activity, prevented from owning guns, and kept out of trusted positions. And those with personal relationships could be warned.

Tracking people is big business. Either we shut down those businesses, or continue into an open society where all info can be bought and sold.

Banks get your credit score before lending you money. A car buyer gets Carfax to get your vehicle history before buying your used car. You should be able to get someone's mental health history before hiring her or going on a date.

You might say that tracking mental illness would discourage people from getting treatment. But that might be a good thing, as a lot of mental health treatment is destructive.

The NY Times reports:

Aidan, 18, developed involuntary tics after watching videos on TikTok posted by teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. “It looked like Aidan was going crazy,” recalled their mother, Rhonda.

… Four out of five of the adolescents were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and one-third reported past traumatic experiences, according to a study from the University of Calgary that analyzed nearly 300 cases from eight countries. In new research that has not yet been published, the Canadian team has also found a link to gender: The adolescents were overwhelmingly girls, or were transgender or nonbinary — though no one knows why.

These kids are going crazy.

The London Daily Mail reports:

A mother has admitted regretting letting her four-year-old son socially transition to a girl - and said realizing her mistake was like 'leaving a cult'.

Rose, who wishes to stay anonymous, raised her two sons as gender neutral with her wife, which was reflected in their clothes, toys and language.

When her four-year-old son said he felt like a girl, the mother encouraged him in his new identity - which she has now admitted was a 'mistake' that 'haunts' her. ...

'This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation. I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.'

As the two boys grew up, the parents used 'he/him' for their pronouns but did not tell them they were boys.

In Rose's essay - called 'True Believer' - she said this meant she was 'primed to look for clues' that her children could be transgender.

This lesbian mom appears to be mentally ill, and susceptible to cult thinking. I would like to believe that she has recovered, but most do not.