Chances are, if you’re in a first-world country in the world, you’re doing pretty good.
That’s according to yet another one of these “happiness indexes” we’ve seen crop up over the past decade. This one is actually called the Legatum Prosperity Index, and purports to measure a country’s overall prosperity based upon a number of characteristics.
So do you live in one of the world’s most prosperous, and therefore happiest, countries?
Some well-meaning folks believe that all we need is “better mental health treatment,” and suddenly we will no longer see school shootings or mass murders. While better access to mental health treatment will help society in the long-run for numerous reasons, it will make little difference for these rare mass shooting events.
Contrary to popular belief (and media hype), mass shootings are not on the rise. And on the face of it, it is fairly ridiculous to focus so much “preventative attention” on something that accounts for less than one percent of murders in the U.S. in any given year.
We’re driven to do so for emotional reasons, not logical ones. But even if you employ emotion as the rationale for improving society’s access to treatment for mental illness, will that matter one whit?
From 2009 until 2013, states have cut more than $4.35 billion from mental health funding for treatment and related services for those most in need in America. Yes, you read that right — $4.35 billion. In tough times, states always turn to cutting social services first.
The message states seem to be sending is, “Hey, we know you’re already poor, so if we cut services to you, well, how much worse could your life be?”
So it comes as a relief — well, a little relief — that the White House announced the rejiggering of some budgets to free up $100 million in funding of mental health services to states.
Is this enough of a response — or even the right response — to the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre?
Last week, I wrote about how Canadian Ellen Richardson, who suffers from bouts of depression, was barred from entering the U.S. One of the outstanding question raised about that story was how U.S. customs agents were accessing Canadians’ suicide attempts and hospitalization records. A senior official for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency told me that they only have access to criminal and police databases, from a mutual sharing arrangement with Canada.
Well, it appears the Canadian RCMP are the ones to blame. Because for years now, the RCMP has been putting information about Canadians who attempt or even just threaten suicide into a national law enforcement database called the CPIC. Which is then shared with U.S. customs and law enforcement agencies.
Why would the RCMP want to keep track of those who threaten suicide in a law enforcement database? Is this just another example of the police discriminating against people with mental illness?
I was recently intrigued by the claims made — and that went completely unchallenged — by Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist who was interviewed by Wired Science’s Greg Miller. I guess my expectations for something appearing on Wired should be readjusted.
Patel claimed that specially-trained health professionals could provide enough care to people that they may be able to treat clinical depression successfully. (The article suggests these are the same as “laypeople,” but really, they’re not.) With skills learned in as little as 2 days.
An amazing claim? You bet. One based in reality? Let’s find out…
Could you imagine being discriminated against because you had a broken arm? Or a diagnosis of cancer? Or suffered from a concussion (like hundreds of pro sports players do every year) and were denied rights everyone else enjoys?
What if you suffered from clinical depression and have been, at past times in your life, severely depressed? Should the government be allowed to discriminate against you because of a mental health diagnosis?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s agency of Customs and Border Protection apparently thinks that maybe sometimes the answer should be “yes.”
You’d think I was making this up. Sadly, I’m not.
I last wrote what the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare or the ACA) will mean to mental health treatment in the U.S. over a year ago. Since the Act’s passage and further analysis of it, it’s time to revisit this topic.
Some of the initial rosy predictions about the ACA are likely not to pan out quite as we had hoped. While the Act will indeed expand coverage and treatment options for millions of Americans who previously had little or no choice, it may also inadvertently take away some treatment options currently in widespread use.
Let’s find out why.
Next week marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy signing historic legislation known as the Community Mental Health Act (back when the name of legislature plainly reflected what was in it). It was the country’s boldest attempt to bring mental health care into the modern era by moving people out of inpatient psychiatric hospitals, and put them back in the community where they belong, making mental health care affordable and readily available to all Americans.
And due to the federal government slashing funding for mental health care in the 1980s, the legislation was wildly successful in emptying out state psychiatric hospitals of old. The problem is, they had nowhere to go, because the government never bothered to come anywhere close to funding community mental health centers to make them an equivalent replacement.
John F. Kennedy’s vision here was bold but sadly unrealized. Fifty years later, our biggest providers of mental health care in the U.S.A. are not hospitals or community mental health centers at all… but prisons.
America — like the rest of the world — is facing a fundamental shift in its population from younger to older in the next few decades. Due to great leaps in technology and health, people are simply living longer.
Some places aren’t well-prepared for this shift. Nowhere is that more true than in the U.S.
In America, I’m ashamed to acknowledge we too-often treat seniors like people whose contributions to society have ended. They have nothing left to share, and so are shuffled off to a nursing home.
How does that make the elderly feel? Let’s just say that it’s not real good for their mental health.
While many of us in the U.S. are enjoying the spoils of a three-day Memorial Day weekend, there are some who are working despite the holiday. Besides hourly workers in retail, hospitality and restaurants (and entrepreneurs!), most people get weekends off.
Well, they did.
Then came the Internet. And managers and bosses were suddenly expected to check their work emails regularly on the weekends. Employees soon followed. What started out as, “I’ll just check email for anything that’s an emergency,” quickly turned into, “Shoot, these four things really need to get done. Might as well work on them now — even though it’s a Saturday.”
Then came the iPhone and smartphones. And suddenly everyone is reachable any time, anywhere.
While I love how connected technology has allowed us all to become, it’s also become obvious that the line between “work” and “not work” leisure time has been blurred for many beyond all recognition.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a summary report yesterday detailing how the CDC measures mental illness in the U.S., and summary statistics from those measurements. Most of the information summarized in the report is not new, since it was previously published. What the report does do is bring a great deal of this information together in a single paper.
The report notes that according to the World Health Organization, mental illness — that is, any mental disorder — accounts for more disability in developed countries than any other group of illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. Yet all we hear people talk about in the media time and time again is reducing your risk of these health problems. We rarely hear anyone talk about reducing your risk of anxiety or depression.
According to a rigorous health survey conducted by the CDC in 2004, an estimated 25 percent of adults in the U.S. reported having a mental illness in the previous year. Lifetime prevalence rates of mental illness in the U.S. were around 50 percent when measured back in 2004. That means in a family of four, one of you likely has a mental illness.
However, mental illness is greatly weighted toward our senior years, when things start looking pretty bleak.
Everyday, the same scene plays itself out across American neighborhoods across the United States. Mothers pull up in their Suburbans and Lexus SUVs at the entrance to their housing development. Even though the families live in perfectly safe, middle-class (or better) neighborhoods, parents feel the need to chauffeur their children the few blocks from the bus stop to home. Why?
This behavior may be understandable if the child is 5 or 6. But at 8 or 10, this behavior is ludicrous and symptomatic of a dangerous infection that has spread throughout this country in the latest generation of parents.
If not stopped, we may end up raising a whole generation or two of children who have little effective life coping skills and no connection or understanding to the world around them.