Ensuring the mental health of Americans is a costly affair. Three recent unrelated occurrences should help us realize there is no inexpensive way to prevent, diagnose and treat mental illness. By now most of us have heard about the “broken” Veterans Administration and its failure to provide timely services that has led premature deaths of veterans. Newspapers, broadcast media and numerous blogs have reported about various calls for the resignation of VA Department Secretary Eric Shinseki following a few damaging reports about unacceptable medical practices involving veterans—particularly the report out of Phoenix that veterans
were dying after secret waiting lists were discovered falsifying wait times for treatment.
While the focus of the VA investigation has been on medical services, many of the veterans who are not receiving timely treatment are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other brain injuries because the VA simply was not prepared for the huge numbers of soldiers returning from deployments with serious mental health issues. Approximately 2.6 million soldiers were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and it is estimated that 20 percent of returning veterans have screened positively for PTSD and depression. The VA estimates as many as 22 veterans commit suicide every day.
So far, President Obama is standing by Shinseki but finds himself faced with another crisis that questions his ability to lead. Unfortunately, there are few topics too sacrosanct not to politicize. But the woes of the VA go farther back than the Obama Administration. The VA budget has been increased significantly over the years even during the sequestration. However, as battlefield medical advances save more soldiers’ lives, they are returning with more complex problems that are quite expensive to treat.
The Veterans Affairs fiasco comes on the heels of the rejection of the National Football League’s offer of $765 million to settle lawsuits by 4,878 former NFL players (and 1,000 family members) who suffered concussions during their careers. U.S. District Judge Anita Brody rejected the settlement reached by the NFL with its former players because she was concerned that the settlement was not sufficient to cover the needs of the claimants. The lawsuit was sparked by the discovery of the degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brain of the late Pittsburgh Steelers center, Mike Webster who died in 2002 at the age of 50 years old. That story was the subject of a Frontline documentary, League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.
Subsequent to the concussion lawsuit, 500 players have filed another lawsuit accusing the NFL of obtaining and administering illegal drugs in an effort to mask the pain and symptoms of various injuries such as broken legs and ankles. Turning a blind eye and even denying the traumatic brain injuries (TBI) suffered by NFL players resulted in incalculable costs to families and children. The NFL has taken dramatic steps to reduce the chance of TBIs but concussions are still a staple of a very violent game.
The third occurrence—another mass killing—in Santa Barbara, California, happened Friday night when Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old son of Hunger Games assistant director Peter Rodger went on a hate-filled rampage, killing six and injuring 13 others before shooting himself. More human life destroyed by someone who obviously should not have been able to purchase guns. Yet Congress consistently fails to pass laws requiring stricter background checks despite the fact that 90 percent of Americans favor stricter background checks. The last serious attempt to pass a gun sale background bill, S.22—the Gun Show Background Check of 2013—failed last year when five skittish Democrats voted against a bill offered by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey. The National Rifle Association has ensured that no gun control law gets passed by holding many of our nation’s lawmakers hostage.
There is no way to address mental health on the cheap. Failure to provide adequate resources for prevention, screening and treatment often come with a heavy price. Threats to mental wellbeing will increase as we become more socially isolated, consumed and fixated on our device of choice. We no longer have to leave home to bowl alone.
The post The Skyrocketing Costs of Mental Health appeared first on Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy.
Written By Charles E. Lewis Jr., Ph.D
The Skyrocketing Costs of Mental Health was originally published @ Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy » Charles Lewis and has been syndicated with permission.
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Honestly, what is wrong with you Mr. Lewis? The common denominator in all rampages and almost all suicides and violence IS THE TREATMENT. People go for treatment, end up on brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that propel them into insanity and we have more and more horrific results.
Veterans have more problems then ever in history because they are put on psychiatric drugs early…on deployment and now, even in basic training before they ever saw action. Get and view the video with all the facts: The Hidden Enemy: Psychiatry’s Hidden Agenda.
End the psychiatric drug treatment of any issue and guaranteed, as in the days before drug treatment when Quaker Hospitals and Soteria House did incredible recovery work, our society will improve dramatically. Since psychiatry has taken over ‘mental illness’ the industry has become a boon to pharmaceutical profits with disability at astronomical rates. If the people who did go for treatment actually got better, then your nonsense might be considered valid, but no one recovers from psychiatric treatment…no one!
We don’t need more of the same treatment…we need non-drug treatments, but people like you keep tip-toeing around the real issue, when all you need do is look at the treatment people are on within the year before they hurt themselves or others and see for yourself. See CCHRint.org if it’s too much trouble to look at the facts. Check with Dr. Peter Breggin, the world’s leading authority and court-approved expert on psychiatric treatment and the harm it does…
People like you really upset me with your biased, phony claims demanding more of the same. If you REALLY want to do the job you were hired to do, get all the facts and stop helping to send people to their early demise by suggesting that conventional treatment is going to help them…statistics show it doesn’t do anything but make them worse and make them fully addicted to and dependent on pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of their shortened lives.
While, I appreciate your passionate response about the dangers of the overuse of psychotropic drugs to treat mental illness, I am a bit surprised how you see that as the overriding issue in my post. My point is mental health is costly and that it is better to invest adequate resources at the front end–prevention, screening, diagnosis and treatment because sometimes there are grave consequences if left untreated.
The statistics and lawsuits prove there are far graver consequences when psychiatric drugs and electroshock are involved in so-called ‘mental illness treatments’. And the diagnoses follow a child for life…just ask anyone trying to get a job who was diagnosed as ADHD or with Oppositional Defiance Disorder for having a natural, normal reaction to abuse when they were growing up …diagnoses that are nothing more than opinion, with no scientific support whatever.
In fact, my passion about this after seeing far too many children ruined for life by ‘treatment’, could easily be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder! I am advocating for little children who are being streamed to professional killers in white coats by people and ‘committees’ like yours who make things far worse by going along to get along and to earn a paycheck at the expense of those chidren.
If you really want to help, then don’t call it mental illness for starters. Call a child’s behavior the result of poverty, neglect, abuse, chemicalized nutrition and almost no nutrition at all. Validate their suffering, don’t re-victimize them by pretending they don’t have a right to feel and behave as they do when forced to live as they are!
By addressing these real issues and FIXING them instead of putting all your time and money into promoting what has proven not to work for over 60 years, you will actually be helping the victims instead of making their lives worse just to enrich ‘the system’ run by pharmaceutical drug companies.
Childhood is not a mental illness. It was proven in court by Dr. Peter Breggin that mental illness does not exist but as an opinion of the ‘morally superior’.
But greedy doctors and pharmaceutical companies found it easy to turn the results of childhood neglect, malnutrition and abuse into a profit by re-victimizing them. And you are helping the most evil amongst us when you suggest that children should be even more streamed to these ‘treatments’ without making clear that drug therapy will worsen outcomes, guaranteed.
A recent study of 17,000 Canadian kids drugged for ADHD proved that not a single child improved…every single one worsened, their family situations worsened even to the point of suicide and violence.
If you want to help, then stop suggesting ‘treatment’ without clearly excluding drug treatment. Or maybe just start writing about how children’s lives have worsened since psychiatry/pharmaceutical cartel got into the educational system. Then maybe you would get my support instead of my disgust.
The situation those with mental health problems find themselves in can be considered a microcosm of larger social problems. While most complain of how little those on opposite sides of the political spectrum work together, often it is their shared view that the rich and powerful must be pampered while their abuses are denied, covered-up, excused and then justified which prevent the nation from working together for greater harmony and cooperation. Washington D.C. seems to be primarily inhabited by lawyers (one skilled in circumvention of the law. The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce ©1911 Neale Publishing Company,©2003 The Folio Society) who constantly find scapegoats to explain their shortcomings; failures in policy and law. “Many mental health programs are not staffed with physicians practiced in medical diagnosis and thus are unprepared to detect a large proportion of physical diseases in their patients. As described elsewhere, California’s state mental health programs fail to detect many diseases that could be causing or exacerbating psychiatric disorders” (A Medical Algorithm for Detecting Physical Disease in Psychiatric Patients, Hospital and Community Psychiatry Vol. 40 No. 12 Dec 1989, Pg. 1270) In 1995 a study found that from 5–40% of psychiatric patients have medical ailments that would adequately explain their symptoms. The next year, in 1996, Sydney Walker III, M.D., a psychiatrist, in his book, A Dose of Sanity, claimed studies have shown that from 41% to 75% of individuals are initially misdiagnosed, often due to overlooked treatable conditions. In 2009, it was found that up to 25% of mental health patients have medical conditions that exacerbate psychiatric symptoms. Yet, most of the debate today centers on forcing drugs on individuals, not providing effective, adequate diagnosis and treatment. (excerpts from Liberty & Mental Health – You Can’t Have One Without the Other – expected release Summer 2014)
Grace, you are doing this world a huge disservice with such garbage advice and information. Duh, mental illness comes first, then the drugs. Do you even know that 1 in 6 adults has some form of diagnosable mental illness that was caused/created from childhood trauma, abuse, and/or neglect. PERIOD. Mental illness is started and created in your childhood. Mental illness is not only genetic, there must be some form of trauma, abuse, and/or neglect for it to manifest itself. Poor PARENTING is the number one (90%) cause of mental illness! Mental illness and dysfunction is passed on from generation to generation because everyone is taught to “respect your parents” even when the parents don’t deserve any respect. We are all backwards trying to fix things that we ourselves broke. START WITH PARENTING, and you will see change fast.
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PARENTS are the #1 reason why children are being drugged at epidemic levels. Doctors have no choice but to drug children who are misbehaving or acting out in some way simply because the parents must blame someone and it is always easier to blame the child. Children act out their anxiety and pain, and most of a child’s anxiety and pain is caused from their homelife/environment. Why is everyone so dumb? It is because of our ridiculous inherent ideal that we all have the right to bear children and to raise them how we wish without interference from anyone. It’s pure “parental arrogance” that has gotten us here. There isn’t one stitch of humbleness when it comes to being a parent, they all think that they are perfect even when they are abusive or neglectful. ALL parents think that they do nothing wrong and ALL parents think that they have rights to do things to their children that they should not. Mental illness and dysfunction is passed on because facing and exposing it is impossible to do because of society’s reaction to it and our governments handling of it (courts like to sweep these things under the rug because it’s easier to silence a child than it is an adult.) Pedophiles have way more rights than children do and they easily and knowingly manipulate our entire system every day so that friends, relatives, neighbors, teachers, etc. are all afraid to speak up. I know firsthand what happens to those who try to speak up and expose child abuse. They are also further abused and victimized by their peers and our legal system. We should all be ashamed of ourselves the way that abused and neglected children are ignored every single day. They all grow up with mental health issues because of their very sick and sad environment. Even the smallest parenting mistakes can cause permanent injury, harm, and damage to a child’s psyche for the rest of their lives. Many with mental illness have no idea how where to even start, and most do not even know that they have anything wrong with them. IGNORANCE and selfishness is what is fueling the mental illness epidemic. Everyone would rather do the easy thing and that is to look away and be silent. Everyone would rather believe a pedophile’s story over a child victim’s word because the pedophile has more power and rights to harm. Wake up everyone. Take off the blinders. Stop being so selfish.