Recently a local politician lobbied for improved mental health coverage by noting that 1 in 18 adults has a mental illness. The local paper was skeptical. They checked it out, though, and agreed that this figure is likely correct. Now I know I run in mental illness circles, but 1 in 18 seems super low to me, between 5 and 6 percent. Heck, studies estimate OCD rates of 2-3 percent.
And it seems that whenever mental illness comes up, every person I talk to has at least one person in their fairly close family who deals with one.
Wikipedia (maybe not the best source, but surely not the worst) tells me that in large-scale surveys, around 25 percent of Americans met the criteria for a mental disorder over the prior 12 months.
I could not bring myself to read many of the comments made about the online article in my local paper, since they skewed toward "yeah, people just want the government to support them." Americans seems to swing back and forth between, "lock 'em all up" and "don't give 'em a dime." Good times.
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You are stronger than you think!
1 year ago
I agree the figure is very low. Actually, I think it is NAMI that says it's more like 1 in 4 lifetime prevalence of mental illness. THAT figure I will buy. Since I've "come out" about my OCD, I cannot tell you how many people have responded with, "Oh, I have this," or "My spouse has that," or "My parent has this." I totally believe the 1 in 4 figure.
ReplyDeleteI remember years ago when I first went on medication for my OCD, my sister said she mentioned it to a few people. And every one of them had a sibling who was on some type of similar medication.
DeleteAnn, I agree that 1 in 18 sounds low. I've read that 1 in 4 Americans will have a diagnosable mental disorder at some point in their lives.
ReplyDeleteOur society does have a weird relationship with mental illness. There's such an attitude of "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" and "don't talk about it." I hope things are getting better. But I probably wouldn't have been able to read the comments on that article either!
I fall prey to the "will myself into a cure" attitude a lot, but it hasn't worked yet!
DeleteYou're right--there are a lot of people with things like anxiety and depression. I know of several! It is not that everyone has really, really bad issues or cannot work, but they still experience problems.
ReplyDeleteexactly!
DeleteI get so frustrated with people speaking ill of other people for being on disability or using food stamps or getting any services from the government that might possibly be described as welfare. They make it sound like all such people are lazy and want to live off of other people's labor. They don't seem to realize that perhaps many of them don't want to need government support.
ReplyDeleteI also doubt Americans remember the cost of "locking them up." Maybe they think if we are locked up, we wont cost a dime.
Those safety nets are there for a reason. It's also annoying when people assume mentally ill= completely unable to function in society. I guess we work so hard to blend in that we're doing it too well!
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