Office of mental health

On July 10th the Office of Mental Health announced that it was planning on transforming the public mental health system. The plan is set to take place over a period of three years and will begin in July 2014. The reason for the establishment of this plan is to address the issue of the public mental health system’s “outdated and costly” methods. The OMH feels that the current methods are too expensive and are not effective enough. According to Acting Commissioner Kristin M. Woodlock, the plan will allow the public mental health system to operate in a more cost efficient manner, and will save money as well as improve the mental health system. As part of this plan the Office of Mental Health will be shifting the emphasis of its resources from costly long term inpatient treatment provided at over 24 hospitals to a state-of-the-art network of 15 “Regional Centers of Excellence.”
As a critical thinker there are a couple of steps that I would like to take in order to evaluate this article. Firstly is whether or not there are any assumptions that the author is making when writing this article. There seems to be both a value assumption and a descriptive assumption being made here. The descriptive assumption is that the author states that the current methods being used by the public mental health system are both outdated and costly. Since the author never gives us any specifics to show us that this is true, it is an assumption that must be made. The value assumption is that the OMH values money over complete long term care programs. This is shown in the fact that the OMH is deciding to do away with these programs and to replace them with Regional Centers that will cost less. Secondly is whether or not there are any fallacy arguments being used. In this article the author uses no fallacious arguments in his/her reasons. Lastly is the overall clarity of the article. In this regard there are some issues. The author uses too many ambiguous terms and does…