1 in 5 Americans (45 Million) had mental illness in 2009 - US government researchers

[purplechoe]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40257545/ns/health-mental_health


1 in 5 Americans had mental illness in 2009
Number is slightly up from previous year, researchers reported

By Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
updated 11/18/2010 1:42:18 PM ET 2010-11-18T18:42:18

CHICAGO — More than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness last year, and 11 million had a serious illness, U.S. government researchers reported on Thursday.

Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest level of mental illness at 30 percent, while those aged 50 and older had the lowest, with 13.7 percent, said the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA.

The rate, slightly higher than the previous 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes of Health, said.

"Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed," Pamela Hyde, SAMHSA's administrator, said in a statement.

"The consequences for individuals, families and communities can be devastating. If left untreated mental illnesses can result in disability, substance abuse, suicides, lost productivity, and family discord."

The 2009 mental health survey hints at the impact of record unemployment rates, which last year hit a 25-year high as struggling employers slashed jobs to cope with a weak economy.

For many, lost employment meant loss of health insurance, leaving many of the nation's mentally ill unable to get treatment.

10 percent of the jobless had major depression...

[sailingaway]

You know, when the rate is THAT high it makes me wonder how many people are stretching symptoms for insurance coverage purposes.....

Call me cynical.

Or maybe the definition of 'mental illness' is driven by bias, sort of like the definition of 'extreme' in the latest election....

[LudwigVonMisoSoup]

You know, when the rate is THAT high it makes me wonder how many people are stretching symptoms for insurance coverage purposes.....

Call me cynical.

Or maybe the definition of 'mental illness' is driven by bias, sort of like the definition of 'extreme' in the latest election....

Disability.

[Anti Federalist]

And once the fully interconnected e-medical records database gets put into place, that's 45 million people who will have their 2nd Amendment rights taken away.

That being said, I would not be surprised if that number was correct or maybe even higher.

We're stuck in a sick, declining, ever more increasingly authoritarian and abusive society.

No wonder people are going nuts.

[ChickenHawk]

Everyone, and I mean ever single person, has some sort of mental defect. You can set the point at which a defect is considered "mental illness" anywhere you want to get the statistic that you want. You could also diagnose just about anyone with mental illness if you adjust what you consider "normal". It seems the definition of mental illness get broader all the time and it seems to coincide with the availability of drugs to treat it.

[Anti Federalist]

Everyone, and I mean ever single person, has some sort of mental defect. You can set the point at which a defect is considered "mental illness" anywhere you want to get the statistic that you want. You could also diagnose just about anyone with mental illness if you adjust what you consider "normal". It seems the definition of mental illness get broader all the time and it seems to coincide with the availability of drugs to treat it.

Big Pharma marketing a new drug to treat a disease that maybe didn't exist or was certainly not in the public purview?

I dunno, sounds a little "conspiratorial" if you ask me.

;)

[ChickenHawk]

Big Pharma marketing a new drug to treat a disease that maybe didn't exist or was certainly not in the public purview?

I dunno, sounds a little "conspiratorial" if you ask me.

;)

Hey, I'm a proud conspiracy theorists. I just don't think conspiracies generally work the way people tend to think they do.

[purplechoe]

Hey, I'm a proud conspiracy theorists. I just don't think conspiracies generally work the way people tend to think they do.

Ron Paul conspires constantly with his friends to promote liberty... :)

[BuddyRey]

I think the modern psychiatric establishment plays much too fast and loose with terms like "mental illness." A lot of people are called "mentally ill" today who would have only been considered strange, eccentric, or melancholy at the turn of the last century.

Don't get me wrong - I don't go quite as far as Thomas Szasz does, and insist that mental illness doesn't exist; but I think the criteria are becoming more and more broad as there is more and more money to be made in diagnosis and treatment of said disorders.

[Kotin]

4 in 5 members of the government had mental illness in 2009 - Me

[Philhelm]

That being said, I would not be surprised if that number was correct or maybe even higher.

We're stuck in a sick, declining, ever more increasingly authoritarian and abusive society.

No wonder people are going nuts.

^This +1,000.

It's no surprise that people are becoming more and more miserable.

[ChaosControl]

"Mental illness" is over diagnosed.

I'm sure some idiot could label me "mentally ill" because I am introverted and don't like being in large groups of people. Likewise they could label someone else "mentally ill" because they are extroverted and don't like being alone. It'd ridiculous.

[Rael]

1 in 5 Americans had mental illness in 2009

That's crazy!

[Kylie]

And once the fully interconnected e-medical records database gets put into place, that's 45 million people who will have their 2nd Amendment rights taken away.

That being said, I would not be surprised if that number was correct or maybe even higher.

We're stuck in a sick, declining, ever more increasingly authoritarian and abusive society.

No wonder people are going nuts.



These words were in my mind before I read your comment.

It's no wonder people are nuts. They train us from an early age that we are not to think, just blindly obey and regurgitate information. When you realize that your life is not your life, nor any semblance of the life you would have chosen, you will flip your lid, and usually do....but they call it teenage angst, right? Or is it now clinical depression??

[Marenco]

This reminded me of a great article i encountered a few days ago. Here it is.


Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on December 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?

No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."

Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."

An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

[Anti Federalist]

These words were in my mind before I read your comment.

It's no wonder people are nuts. They train us from an early age that we are not to think, just blindly obey and regurgitate information. When you realize that your life is not your life, nor any semblance of the life you would have chosen, you will flip your lid, and usually do....but they call it teenage angst, right? Or is it now clinical depression??

Exactly.

And just ask, the system will drug those unhappy thoughts right out of you.

Making you docile, complaint and happy.

:mad:

[Philhelm]

Remember folks, there used to be a mental disorder known as draptomania, which was the reason slaves in the U.S. had fled from their captivity. Psychology has always been used as a tool for oppression, and today is no different.

Also, if 20% of Americans are mentally ill, and 80% of Americans like being groped and porno-scanned, I wonder how these two numbers can be used...

[moostraks]

Years ago I was in a situation. Without dragging up all the gorey details suffice it to say I was in a pretty screwed situation and having the welfare of my children threatened by a very aggressive, abusive ex-spouse and family and co-workers were demanding I do something I found morally unconscionable. So I made sure the children were in good hands and sought the advice of the mental health community because I felt like the walls were closing in.

Fast forward a few years and this issue is used against me in regards to the ability to care for my own children. Even though the reason for the problems I had previously were because of my conscience and regard for the children. They had prescribed anti-anxiety drugs. The stupid things never worked because I ditched them as I realized it was a situational problem and I had to resolve the issue because being doped up was not an option for me. What I needed was the time to see the situation from a distance to resolve it. However now I am stigmatized as having mental health problems for having sought outside help.

Lesson learned? This is used as a means to control the public. They made it seem socially acceptable to seek help, and drugs are readily prescribed by doctors even though they are not a solution but a band-aid. Then you will have this used against you at a later point in time if you don't comply.(that may seem like a harsh statement but it is true by my own experience)

Fast forward to the issues we have with the eldest child. She is a complete terror to live with and has no conscience. She has learned how to manipulate and is highly intelligent. The mental health system put us through the wringer. They tried all numbers of drugs in varying combinations and dosages before realizing her issues are a learned behavior that can only be stopped by reacting. Many still think we haven't found the right drug yet to 'fix' her and still wanted us found unfit as parents because we are not pursuing medication. That is until the see her in action (turning on them) then most people run as far the other direction while saying something to the effect of I don't know how you do it...

So imo the mental health community is a pill pushing nightmare with largely no real understanding of that which they speak. Many are corrupted by pharmaceutical kickbacks. Most have no ability to see further than the guidelines provided by the latest standards and are easily used by government agencies to push a specific agenda...

[Todd]

I think the modern psychiatric establishment plays much too fast and loose with terms like "mental illness." A lot of people are called "mentally ill" today who would have only been considered strange, eccentric, or melancholy at the turn of the last century.

Don't get me wrong - I don't go quite as far as Thomas Szasz does, and insist that mental illness doesn't exist; but I think the criteria are becoming more and more broad as there is more and more money to be made in diagnosis and treatment of said disorders.

There's also the tendancy to think that anyone who thinks "differently" along those eccentricity lines, must be mentally ill as well.

Probably the beginnings of having us all committed for "weird" thought processes.



"So, You believe the government is evil?" "You need medication"

[Southron]

Of course everyone is mentally ill and not responsible for his own behavior.:rolleyes:

Instead of calling bad behavior what it really, we dismiss it as a mental defect that "can't be helped."

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies get richer and consciences are clear and void of guilt from their actions.

[oyarde]

4 in 5 members of the government had mental illness in 2009 - Me

My thoughts as well .

[Toureg89]

actually, this is technically true. but its because we are using the WRONG definitions of mental illness, as the DSM (since atleast the 80s) has over medicalized healthy sadness/feelings of loss.

[South Park Fan]

How much of that 30% of 18-30 year olds are people with "Attention Deficit Disorder"?