Anyone can get an idea of the sad state of America’s mental health system by simply searching it on the internet. One will not find articles of praise and positive statistics but rather those painting the grim, broken, and massively underfunded picture that our country has come to know.
43.6 million people ages 18 and older suffer from DSM-5 diagnosed mental illnesses in the United States. 22% of those people suffer from severe mental illnesses, or those that cause severe daily deficits and prevent day to day activities (ex: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, etc.) Despite these large numbers, we’ve seen the mentally ill migrate from mental health institutions to city streets, hospitals, and prisons.
Representative Tim Murphy, a republican from the state of Pennsylvania, said it best when he stated that the the United States has “replaced the hospital bed with the jail cell, the homeless shelter, and the coffin.” This isn’t a hard statement to hear once you consider that 60 percent of adults suffering from mental illnesses receive no treatment.
But if all of this is true, why is it that the topic of mental health is only truly brought to the public’s eyes and discussed following a tragedy such as a mass shooting when there are families across the country facing their own daily struggles and tragedies because of it?
So what exactly are we ignoring? Maybe the fact that 38,000 Americans die every year due to suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that’s more than car accidents or homicides. 90% of those suicides are related to mental illness according to the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel. We’re definitely ignoring the fact that people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses die up to 23 years sooner than other Americans. That’s equal to the life expectancy of people in Nigeria or South Sudan, and if the fact that there are people in our country who are expected to only live as long as those in lesser-developed countries in Africa, put things in perspective, I don’t know what will.
Many proponents of revamping our mental health systems in America argue that it would just cost too much. But what actually would that cost be? Could it possibly be any more than what taxpayers are spending right now due to the lack of sufficient institutions?
The National Institute of Mental Health approximates that mental illness costs Americans a whopping $444 billion dollars a year. However, the bulk of that does not go to treatment like one would think, but rather the cost of disability payments and loss of productivity. This immense amount does not even begin to touch on the cost of tax payer dollars that go to the building and upkeep of the prisons that so many mentally ill persons find themselves in.
Insel states that when dealing with the financial burden of mental health, the United States has chosen the “most expensive way possible. It is with this neglect that rather than offering support initially, the country ends up 'paying for lifelong support'.”
An example of this is the fact that more and more of the mentally ill are ending up in prisons and jails every year. A 2013 study found in Psychiatric Services in Advance found that 2 million people with mental illness go to jail every year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that 15 percent of all state prisoners and 24 percent of jail inmates are psychotic and when you look at what the cost is a year to house an inmate cost really does not seem like such a valid argument anymore. The national average cost of incarceration per year is roughly $28,000 dollars, however, in some states such as New York that cost could be as high as $60,000. So while states have cut mental health funding over the past few decades, they have increased spending on prisons and jails.
A study done within my home state of Georgia exhibited that providing mental health focused-services to mentally ill in the criminal justice system vastly decreased the days participants spent in jail (78 percent) and the number of days spent in the hospital (89 percent). Within its first year alone, the program saved more than $1 million.
So cutting mental health funding may not be the answer, especially if 350,000 of these people end up behind bars costing taxpayers money regardless. That’s 10 times more people behind bars than in state funded psychiatric beds. If we’re paying for the mentally ill regardless, should we not at least choose the route in which they would receive adequate help and treatment?
Isn’t it time we diminish the stigma against those suffering from mentally illness and start actually fighting for them to receive the treatment they so desperately need? It’s a situation that will not better itself on its own and it’s up to us as voters to hold ourselves and lawmakers accountable in order to fix the crumbling, yet integral institution in our society. So come on Americans, let’s get talking.
Watch John Oliver give his own humorous, yet spot on discussion of the state of America's mental health system here:
You can read more about these statistics and others regarding mental health at these links:
http://www.bhevolution.org/public/severe_mental_il...http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/stat...
https://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/index.html
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