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As our nation and our community continue to study the impact of health care reform legislation, I would like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts about the need to ensure that behavioral health care is central to these conversations.
As Vice President of Business Development at Poudre Valley Hospital and a Board Member of Larimer Center for Mental Health (LCMH), I am well-acquainted with the costs and results of untreated mental health and addictive disorders in our community. Consider this:
- People with serious mental illness are dying 25 years earlier than their counterparts without mental health issues; 60% of these deaths are from natural causes such as heart disease and diabetes.
- Mental illness is the leading cause of disability for people between the ages of 15 – 44; by 2013, it is estimated that lost productivity in this population will cost the U.S. $300 billion.
- Individuals with untreated mental and substance use disorders are overcrowding our jails and emergency rooms, costing our community significantly more than prevention and treatment would.
As reform expands coverage to the estimated 46 million uninsured Americans, we all can agree that we must, at the same time, seek to control costs. This can not be accomplished without addressing behavioral health. Prevention, early intervention, and treatment for mental health and substance use disorders work, and need to be central to our conversations about reform.
Among the many issues central to health care reform, I ask that you take this opportunity to consider the true costs of untreated behavioral health disorders. If the lives that can be saved are not enough to convince you, please consider the financial impact that will result when we treat individuals as whole people. Diseases of the mind can not, and should not, be addressed separately from diseases of the body.
Dan Robinson
Poudre Valley Hospital
Vice President of Business Development
I sought help for depression,I did not get it from the mental health providers. What I got from them was Stigmatized with a life long label. My medical doctor saved my life. He did not care if I drank beer or had smoked pot. He was concerned with saving my life; not with imposing his moral value system on me. The mental health system is a branch of the police department. What ever you tell them can be used against you. Privacy does not exist!
Until Privacy is the same as what a Lawyer has with their client, no one should ever confide in any mental health provider. They will Betray you. They did me.
I am an individual who was disabled by psychiatric drugs and shock treatment. Once people are considered "mentally ill" we are portrayed dangerous to either "ourselves or others". So people who are treated as "mentally ill" die an average of 25 years sooner than our untreated peers because of of this unfounded fear. The history of organized psychiatry is one of genocide. Most people are treated without their consent. Psychiatry kills. Forced psychiatric is torture.
Let's look more closely at the 3 bulleted points delineated in the above piece.
■ People with serious mental illness are dying 25 years earlier than their counterparts without mental health issues; 60% of these deaths are from natural causes such as heart disease and diabetes.
Calling these deaths natural is a real stretch of the imagination. Most of these deaths are actually the result of metabolic syndrome, that is to say they are the result of physical changes in the body caused by the drugs used in the treatment of psychiatric conditions. A number of physiological conditions are associated with the use of atypical neuroleptic drugs. These health conditions include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, pancreatic ailments, and the list goes on and on. They are iatrogenic, or physician caused, deaths, and therefore, not natural. When a pharmaceutical product has brought about a pre-mature demise, such a death could have been prevented.
■ Mental illness is the leading cause of disability for people between the ages of 15 – 44; by 2013, it is estimated that lost productivity in this population will cost the U.S. $300 billion.
The numbers of people labeled mentally ill and prescribed these deadly psychiatric drugs has been climbing for years. The tax payer is paying the tab for this rise, and the treatments behind it. Added to the number of baby boomers reaching retirement age, this is another major factor in the depletion of social security. Sooner or later, the economic burden becomes too great, and we have to acknowledge that throwing money at the problem did not make the problem go away, quite the reverse. You see what we really need to be doing is coming up with ways to get people out of mental health treatment rather than into mental health treatment. Plenty of people are being treated, sure, its just too few of them are able to leave that treatment behind. Why? The problem is a business, and what business would recognise any benefit to its own decline? The mental health system is more or less a broken system because it is so good as expanding but not very good at contracting. Were it to contract, more people would be leaving treatment than would be entering treatment, and what business works in that fashion? Proponents, professionals, allies, etc., have no problem getting people into treatment, they are completely flumoxed though when it comes to getting people out of treatment.
■Individuals with untreated mental and substance use disorders are overcrowding our jails and emergency rooms, costing our community significantly more than prevention and treatment would.
Emergency rooms aren't equipped to handle problems that aren't physical in nature. (Yes, that's right. Personal problems, what you call mental illnesses, are not physical illnesses.) Law enforcement is locking people up for the most petty of annoyances these days just to get unwanted people off the streets. The problem here is intolerance. When we have a more liveable world we will have less people who are characterized as severely disturbed, unfortuneately it doesn't look at all as if that's the direction this country is taking.