Former congressman Patrick Kennedy: "We have a wasteland of people who have died and been disabled because of inadequate care." Photo Credit: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY
This lengthy USA TODAY feature looks at mental illness in America from different angles. Broken up into four chapters, the piece discusses how stigma is embedded in our healthcare laws, the cost of waiting a long time for the right care, efforts to chip away at "discriminatory policies," and how people are speaking out against stigma.
Stigma against the mentally ill is so powerful that it's been codified for 50 years into federal law, and few outside the mental health system even realize it.
This systemic discrimination, embedded in Medicaid and Medicare laws, has accelerated the emptying of state psychiatric hospitals, leaving many of the sickest and most vulnerable patients with nowhere to turn.
Advocates and experts who spoke with USA TODAY describe a system in shambles, starved of funding while neglecting millions of people across the country each year.
The failure to provide treatment and supportive services to people with mental illness – both in the community and in hospitals – has overburdened emergency rooms, crowded state and local jails and left untreated patients to fend for themselves on city streets, says Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island who has fought to provide better care for the mentally ill.
The USA routinely fails to provide the most basic services for people with mental illness -- something the country would never tolerate for patients with cancer or other physical disorders, Kennedy says.
"Mental health is a separate but unequal system," Kennedy says. "We have a wasteland of people who have died and been disabled because of inadequate care."
Although most people with mental illness are not violent, the USA's dysfunctional, long-neglected mental health system is under a microscope because of mass shootings in which the perpetrators had serious psychiatric problems. In a series of stories in the coming months, USA TODAY will explore the human and financial costs that the country pays for not caring more about the nearly 10 million Americans with serious mental illness.
http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2014/06/25/stigma-of-mental-illness/9875351/
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