You generally don’t hear much about people who have cancer who fail to get treatment. Cancer is the kind of incentive that makes getting treatment, let’s just say… a priority. You also don’t generally hear about people with other chronic concerns — whether it’s diabetes or Parkinson’s disease — who either don’t seek out treatment themselves, or get denied treatment from their public health system.
Yet, around the world every day, hundreds of people die unnecessarily from untreated mental illness. In the United States alone, we lose at least 90 people each and every day due to untreated depression via suicide. That’s about 33,000 people a year, give or take — or about 1 in every 16 minutes.
That means while you’re browsing around the Internet in this session, watching your funny YouTube videos or updating your Facebook status, a few people will have died that didn’t need to. Kinda makes you think, no?
What is it about mental illness that makes people believe their concern doesn’t need treatment? What is it about untreated depression that makes people believe they’re not at risk for death because of it??