Who won the Olympics: Lesson for Mental Illness Advocates

As of now, measuring medals,  NBC gives Olympic rankings as follows

1. USA 42 Medals
2. China 42 Medals
3. Russia 23 Medals
4. Great Britain 22
5. Japan 21 Medals
6. France 19 Medals
7. Germany 19 Medals
8. South Korea 16 Medals
9. Australia 14 Medals
10. Italy 7 Medals

And most Americans believe those rankings. USA is number one. Feels Good. American exceptionalism and all that. But if you measure the number of Olympic medals per capita, the US, China and Russia come out near the bottom.

1. Australia 1620
2. UK 2830
3. S. Korea 3036
4. France 3439
5. Germany 4308
6. Japan 6072
7. Russia 6505
8. US 7477
9. Italy 8687
10. China 32,079

And even this is not an accurate representation, because it only performs the calculation for the top 10 medal winners. Qatar, with one Medal and a small population actually beats the USA and almost every other country in per capita medals. 

What does this have to do with mental illness? 

There is a lot of bad information out there because advocates and media are measuring the wrong thing. For example, many advocates say people with mental illness are not more violent than others. This is true. But that is only because the advocates who create that statistic assume that 40% of the population or so is mentally ill. But when people ask, "Are people with mental illness more violent than others?" they are usually asking about the homeless, psychotic with schizophrenia, not "all mentally ill."  As Sally Satel and I wrote years ago in National Review measuring the wrong thing is a common way to  to underestimate the incidence of violence among people with serious mental illness. 

Measuring the wrong thing is preventing us from adopting the policies that can help the most seriously ill. It is  preventing us from understanding who is really doing well at the Olympics.