Mental Illness

According to a recent study, one quarter of all Americans are mentally ill. Right.

ARticle here.

One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a "serious" disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health, published yesterday.

Although parallel studies in 27 other countries are not yet complete, the new numbers suggest that the United States is poised to rank No. 1 globally for mental illness, researchers said.

Pardon me if I am just a wee bit suspicious. Several years ago I read an article about an attempt to classify a new disability- if you had trouble keeping track of yoru papers, cleaning the house, rememberintg appointments, that sort of thing, you supposedly had a 'shadow' disability, an almost but not quite disability like ADD. That same week I read that shyness was also a disorder, and I decided that the the goal was to eventually have every personality type branded with some sort of disfunctional disorder so that we could excuse our character flaws by calling them illness.

Younger sufferers are especially overlooked, the survey found, even though mental illness is very much a disease of youth.

Being young, that's a disorder, too.

"The survey, conducted by the University of Michigan, included 9,282 households selected at random in 34 states. Nearly 300 trained interviewers traveled about 8 million miles over a year and a half. They knocked on doors at all hours of the day and night to ensure they would not systematically miss alcohol abusers who spend their days at bars, people with depression who can go weeks hardly able to pull themselves out of bed and people with social phobia who only rarely answer the doorbell.

The interview notes were uploaded to a central repository for analysis by psychiatrists and other health professionals at Harvard Medical School.

The survey focused on four major categories of mental illness: anxiety disorders (such as panic and post-traumatic stress disorders); mood disorders (such as major depression and bipolar disease); impulse control disorders (such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder); and substance abuse."

Yeah, if some 'trained interviewer' knocked on my door in the middle of the night to ask me personal questions, I'd be depressed, moody, anxious, and have trouble controlling my impulses, too.

Oddly, the researchers caution against using your religious community and leadership to help you overcome your anxieties and concerns, but the end of the article says,

"It is not clear why Americans have such high rates of mental illness, but cultural factors clearly play a role. Immigrants quickly increase their risk of mental health problems, especially if they do not live in native ethnic communities. Minorities also tend to have lower levels of mental health problems despite lower economic status, suggesting that the social support they provide each other is protective."

The social support from church is also protective. For some reason, I'm thinking of the book And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America's Children
by Louise Armstrong