The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has issued the results of a national survey that found more than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness in 2009. Of those, 11 million had a serious mental illness.
The study found the highest rate of mental illness among young adults aged 18 to 25 at 30 percent. An increase in the numbers are believed to reflect a rise in depression among the unemployed.
Notably, the survey shows that 6.1 million adults last year had a mental health illness that was not being treated.
Source: CNBC
And regarding the kids… and, obviously, the next generation of adults, refer to the following interview:
Dr. Gabor Maté on ADHD, Bullying and the Destruction of American Childhood
November 24, 2010
“He argues that these responses are treating surface symptoms as causes while ignoring deeper roots. Dr. Maté says children are in fact reacting to the broader collapse of the nurturing conditions needed for their healthy development.” (Democracy Now!)
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/24/dr_gabor_mat_on_adhd_bullying
Dr. Gabor Mate:
“There are about half a million kids in this country receiving heavy duty anti-psychotic medications. Medications such as those are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of kids’ behavior with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy duty anti-psychotics on kids.”
Worth listening to or reading, IMO…
Pardon me?:
When Parkour makes you go from Baritone to Falsetto:
if doing the same thing over and over with the same result but expecting a different result is actually an indication of mental illness…..
works in sales, in picking up lovers
in law I read about a guy who sued for defamation, won and was paid. Then the defendant republished the defamation. So the plaintiff sued him 13 more times and it was finally ruled that defamation in a new time frame is a new cause of action.
Mind what mind….
Put a label on them and you can do anything to them….
Well, if doing the same thing over and over with the same result but expecting a different result is actually an indication of mental illness the at least 40 Senators are ill because we’ve given the 2%’s a gigantic tax break for 10 years with no good effect and yet it’s being proposed again as crucial to the country’s economic well-being. All the voters out there that have embraced ‘trickle-down’ economics for the last 40 years an not seen any positive effect seem kinda’ delusional too.
Well, in 2003 I saw a number of something like 37,800 practicing psychiatrists. So my question is, does that 20% mentally ill figure also apply to the practitioners of the trade?
And might a mentally ill psychiatrist not be pretty darn astute at diagnosing maladies of which he or she is only too familiar?
And then of course, there are those of us who are likely considered sane on the Gaussian curve of daily behavior, who do the damndest things with no predicators whatsoever. Consider the psychiatrist in Bakersfield recently who elected to access a man-friend via a chimney chute that turned out to be – sadly – considerably narrower than she was.
In what section might we find her singular fatal behavior, in our doge-eared DSM-IV?
Mayhaps enough of us are falling through the cracks, that assigning a percentage is a tad less than window dressing.
Does the study have a breakdown by party affiliation ?
If it were to be such that the most significant clinical sign of disastrously severe mental illness was a total incapacity of a mentally ill person to recognize said person’s mental illness, what would be a way to accurately diagnose mental illness, and who would be capable of doing an accurate diagnosis?
Is mental illness a conundrum of self-reference which would be paradoxical were it not mental illness?
Exists anything which can result in greater suffering than the suffering resulting from mental illness?
Methinks, perchance, no.
What of the person whose only delusion is believing, in gravely delusional error, that she/he is delusional?
For a person who has in fact a delusional self-image, projection of self-image can out the fact?
I make no claim for myself to be not delusional, neither do I claim to be delusional, for I would skeptically suspect either claim of being itself a delusion.