FACTS

With the help from information provided by uihealthcare.com, I have gathered thier facts and have made many of my own comments on them as follows:

• Severe mental illnesses are more common than Cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
• One in every FIVE families is affected by severe mental illness in their lifetime.
• Psychiatric disorders rank FIRST in terms of nationwide hospital admissions.

These first three points made are all basically saying the same thing– that mental diseases are VERY common among Americans.

• It’s true that severe mental illnesses are biologically based brain diseases that profoundly disrupt a person’s ability to think, feel and relate to others or to their environment.

I always wonder about this definition. Are we trying to give a clinical name and reason to everything that takes place in a humans life, whether its biological or intentional, spontaneous or systematic? Doesn’t this mean then that EVERYONE certainly has something clinically “wrong” with them whether or not it severely effects a persons day to day life in the long run? By this very way of assigning clinical names and giving reasons to everything that takes place in a humans life washes our the actuality of normal. Making it literally impossible to actually be normal.

• There are 48.2 MILLION people in the U.S. with some type of diagnosable mental disorder in a one-year period.
• The treatment success rates for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression are 60 percent, 80 percent and 65 percent, respectively.
• The average treatment success rate for heart disease is 41-52%.

The biggest point to stress here is that the treatment success rate for heart disease is less than the treatment success rate for mental illnesses.

• 50 percent of those seeking mental health care rely on self-payment to pay for treatment.

I think that this last point is implying that mental illnesses should be covered more by insurances and not so much money should be coming out of pocket directly to the care provider.

Information gathered and interpreted from  http://www.uihealthcare.com/news/news/2003/10/06mentalillness.html