Mental Health Today, getting beyond our old stigmas and ignorance
With the advancement in medicine and psychiatric therapies, people are getting better, leading more fulfilling lives than ever before. There is a downside though....
the question is ‘should we have closed all those psychiatric hospitals without properly understanding the long term effects. According to a recent article in JAMA Psychiatry, our current state of how we treat the seriously mentally ill who need long term care is lacking.
We must address our citizens at a time when they need us the most.
From the article:
The number of inpatient psychiatric beds in the United States has seen an extreme drop off in the past 60 years. In 1955, state psychiatric facilities cared for 560,000 patients; today, they have only 45,000 patients. If you account for the doubling of the country’s population, this represents a 95% decline.
Approximately 10 million people in the United States have a serious mental illness; the number of beds in inpatient psychiatric treatment centers can accommodate only a small fraction of these people.
As new drugs and better outpatient therapy became more affordable and widespread, it led to the closure of many inpatient psychiatric hospitals. However, these new treatment options were not adequate for patients with severe, chronic mental illness, and many had to be moved to nursing homes or general hospitals.
For those who couldn’t afford care there, many become homeless or wound up incarcerated. Often, this becomes a cycle: prison, homelessness, acute hospitalization, and re-incarceration.
The more ethical and financially sound option to treat those with mental illness who cannot live independently is to revisit psychiatric hospitals. If the United States opens more modernized, humane facilities, they can give people with severe mental illness a stable living situation, reducing the number of homeless and incarcerated people.
We as a country are very good at putting issues like this out of the public’s mind / sight, to keep our sanitized way of life looking good. To turn a blind eye to the seriousness of long term care for those with mental illness will only lead to increased disconnect to many others who cannot fully take care of their own needs, and what will that leave us with?
While the data from both of these two graphics is not current, it very well shows the trend that we have created as a society, the reality is that It won't fix itself.
Our bottom line: The stigma of the term psychiatric hospital is a strong one that cuts deep. We need to continue to have the discussion, and seek better ways than to just ignore and ‘hope’ things get better. We are better than that.