MIND your Health: Mental Health Month 2007

Mental Health America observes Mental Health Month in May of each year, and this year's theme is MIND your Health. Mental health and illness have been on my mind a lot this month, and I have written about it over at Healthline Connects:

• AJ Hits the Skids: Men and Depression
• Bipolar Spectrum Disorder Updates

And if you have read some of my previous posts,

• Asians and Mental Illness: National Minority Health and Health Disparities Month
• The Human Brain as a Deadly Weapon: Privacy Laws vs. Protecting the Public

you know that there are a lot of unanswered mental health issues swirling in this busy brain of my own. Like many of us, I cried and watched the CNN coverage of the VT tragedy earlier this spring. But I was especially intrigued by the quiet urgency with which a man named Pete Earley spoke when interviewed by Anderson Cooper. He is the parent of a son with bipolar disorder and a former Washington Post Reporter. I picked up his book, Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness and have been reading it during my morning commute, but it's enough to make me seasick on the ferry. For starters, I feel really guilty that journalists, not health care people are doing all the research, analysis and reporting on problems like the fact that American society has criminalized mental illness. I felt the same uneasiness about reading The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS by Edward Hooper and when the Abu Ghraib debacle was exposed. Edward Hooper is a journalist whose findings, while controversial, are nonetheless, exhaustive and provocative, as all good science should be. As to the prisoners in Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib, there have to be doctors, nurses and psychologists particpating in some aspects of torture - who are they? why aren't they speaking out? how can they allow themselves to participate?

Back to Earley's book: I'm only on Chapter 3, and already I am looking at the homeless differently. Mental Health America is running a campaign to create awareness about insurance discrimination for those with mental illness. Given that depression strikes a majority of the population at some point in their lives, that is an important issue. Earley does a great job of documenting how Smith Kline's wonder drug, Thorazine prompted a dramatic shift in public policy toward mental illness as well as psychiatric treatment in the 1960's. State run mental institutions were emptied out, and the mentally ill were supposed to be treated by community mental health centers, funded by $3 billion. The mental hospitals emptied out and closed down. The problem was, the money was siphoned off into other causes (VietNam war) and the community health centers were never built. The mentally ill started getting arrested for loitering, vagrancy, and other charges. They started treating themselves with street drugs. We now know addictions are also due to brain changes and are therefore an illness, not just a the mark of a person with a lack of will power.

So that's why I look at the homeless differently now. That filthy person covered in rags pushing a cart of junk muttering nonsensically, and yes, likely on some type of street drug, is most likely mentally ill. It's enough to make your head spin.

Thank you Lee Dryburgh for use of the photo Homeless by American Flag by Colin Gregory Palmer.

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