Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report

[chloe]

One in five adults in the U.S. had a mental illness in 2010, with people ages 18 to 25 having the highest rates, according to a national survey.


A new national report reveals that 45.9 million American adults aged 18 or older, or 20 percent of this age group, experienced mental illness in the past year. The rate of mental illness was more than twice as high among those aged 18 to 25 (29.9 percent) than among those aged 50 and older (14.3 percent). Adult women were also more likely than men to have experienced mental illness in the past year (23 percent versus 16.8 percent).


The economic impact of mental illness in the United States is considerable—about $300 billion in 2002. According to the World Health Organization, mental illness accounts for more disability in developed countries than any other group of illnesses, including cancer and heart disease.In terms of treatment statistics, the report indicates that about 4 in 10 people experiencing any mental illness in the past year (39.2 percent) received mental health services during that period. Among those experiencing serious mental illness the rate of treatment was notably higher (60.8 percent).
The report also noted that an estimated 8.7 million American adults had serious thoughts of suicide in the past year – among them 2.5 million made suicide plans and 1.1 million attempted suicide

http://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/advisories/1201185326.aspx


I guess we are all a bunch of crazies :laugh2:

[chloe]

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people aged 50 and over had the lowest incidence of any mental illness (14.3 percent), while those aged 18 to 25 had the highest (29.9 percent).
In addition, women were more likely to have experienced mental illness than men (23 percent compared with 16.8 percent of men).
The highest rates of mental illness were found among the mixed-race population (25.4 percent), followed by whites (20.6 percent), blacks (19.7 percent), Native Americans or Alaska natives (18.7 percent), Hispanics (18.3 percent) and Asians (15.8 percent).


<iframe style="top: -100px; width: 1px; height: 1px; position: absolute;" id="pmtracker" src=""></iframe>http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/health/120119/mental-illness-depression-anti-depressives-suicide-drug-us-america

I also read that immigrants seem to develop bi-polar disorder at high rates once they become american citizens. :laugh2:

[revelarts]

Chole, I'm a Skeptic here to, the Psych biz is not a scientific as it promotes. There's more to that side of medicine than meets the eye.

here are a couple of books you might want to look into that give another perspective on diagnosis and treatments.

Mental illness is no joke but not everyone is freaking crazy, 1 in 5 might be stressed, heck everyone is probably Stress mentality in any give couple of months but "mentally ill" I call that BS.



They Say You're Crazy: How The World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal

"How are decisions made about who is normal? As a former consultant to those who construct the “bible of the mental-health professions,” the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), Paula Caplan offers and insider’s look at the process by which decisions about abnormality are made. Cutting through the professional psycho-babble, Caplan clearly assesses the astonishing extent to which scientific methods and evidence are disregarded as the handbook is developed. A must read for consumers and practitioners of the mental-health establishment, which through its creation of potentially damaging interpretations and labels, has the power to alter our lives in devastating ways."


Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders

Used by doctors and therapists all around the country, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the closest thing America has to a bible of mental illness. Currently in its fourth edition, the DSM (as it's commonly called) classifies more than 200 disorders and their symptoms, from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to Generalized Anxiety Disorder and everything in between. In so doing, say Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, the DSM applies the language of mental illness to everyday behavior, transforming ordinary reactions to life's vicissitudes into billable pathology. In Making Us Crazy, Kutchins and Kirk have used 15 years of studying the DSM to produce a lengthy diatribe against its ever-growing list of psychiatric disorders and their overly inclusive symptoms, including bad handwriting, impulsive shopping sprees, and reckless driving. The DSM, they contend, is most influenced by the needs of the insurance industry; every illness comes with its own diagnostic code, widely used for insurance claim forms. Moreover, its choices of which disorders to include and exclude are widely influenced by social prejudices as well as special interests. Given the DSM's list of diagnostic criteria, it is possible to classify almost anyone with objectionable views or behavior that deviates from social norms as "crazy." But in doing so, any mental-health professional would be acting irresponsibly by ignoring the behavior's context--the one factor a reference such as the DSM cannot quantify. -



Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.


Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the "New Psychiatry"

Prozac, Xanax, Halcion, Haldol, Lithium. These psychiatric drugs--and dozens of other short-term "solutions"--are being prescribed by doctors across the country as a quick antidote to depression, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other psychiatric problems. But at what cost?

In this searing, myth-shattering exposé, psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D., breaks through the hype and false promises surrounding the "New Psychiatry" and shows how dangerous, even potentially brain-damaging, many of its drugs and treatments are. He asserts that: psychiatric drugs are spreading an epidemic of long-term brain damage; mental "illnesses" like schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorder have never been proven to be genetic or even physical in origin, but are under the jurisdiction of medical doctors; millions of schoolchildren, housewives, elderly people, and others are labeled with medical diagnoses and treated with authoritarian interventions, rather than being patiently listened to, understood, and helped.

Toxic Psychiatry sounds a passionate, much-needed wake-up call for everyone who plays a part, active or passive, in America's ever-increasing dependence on harmful psychiatric drugs.

Edit:
Thomas Szasz is like the ganddaddy of Psych skeptics his opion is worth a look too.

Psychiatry: The Science of Lies
For more than half a century Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece. Art historians and the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand-physicians, patients, politicians, health insurance providers, and legal professionals-take the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily diseases, systematically authenticating nondiseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and nondisease-genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood-thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain.
There is neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. Individuals and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as "mental diseases" and about medicalized responses misidentified as "psychiatric treatments."
Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds.

[Gunny]

http://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/advisories/1201185326.aspx


I guess we are all a bunch of crazies :laugh2:

I'm okay with it. Last time I thought I was normal I voted for a Democrap.

[chloe]

I'm okay with it. Last time I thought I was normal I voted for a Democrap.


:laugh:

[chloe]

Chole, I'm a Skeptic here to, the Psych biz is not a scientific as it promotes. There's more to that side of medicine than meets the eye.

here are a couple of books you might want to look into that give another perspective on diagnosis and treatments.

Mental illness is no joke but not everyone is freaking crazy, 1 in 5 might be stressed, heck everyone is probably Stress mentality in any give couple of months but "mentally ill" I call that BS.



They Say You're Crazy: How The World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal

"How are decisions made about who is normal? As a former consultant to those who construct the “bible of the mental-health professions,” the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), Paula Caplan offers and insider’s look at the process by which decisions about abnormality are made. Cutting through the professional psycho-babble, Caplan clearly assesses the astonishing extent to which scientific methods and evidence are disregarded as the handbook is developed. A must read for consumers and practitioners of the mental-health establishment, which through its creation of potentially damaging interpretations and labels, has the power to alter our lives in devastating ways."


Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders

Used by doctors and therapists all around the country, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the closest thing America has to a bible of mental illness. Currently in its fourth edition, the DSM (as it's commonly called) classifies more than 200 disorders and their symptoms, from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to Generalized Anxiety Disorder and everything in between. In so doing, say Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, the DSM applies the language of mental illness to everyday behavior, transforming ordinary reactions to life's vicissitudes into billable pathology. In Making Us Crazy, Kutchins and Kirk have used 15 years of studying the DSM to produce a lengthy diatribe against its ever-growing list of psychiatric disorders and their overly inclusive symptoms, including bad handwriting, impulsive shopping sprees, and reckless driving. The DSM, they contend, is most influenced by the needs of the insurance industry; every illness comes with its own diagnostic code, widely used for insurance claim forms. Moreover, its choices of which disorders to include and exclude are widely influenced by social prejudices as well as special interests. Given the DSM's list of diagnostic criteria, it is possible to classify almost anyone with objectionable views or behavior that deviates from social norms as "crazy." But in doing so, any mental-health professional would be acting irresponsibly by ignoring the behavior's context--the one factor a reference such as the DSM cannot quantify. -



Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

The most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture across the globe has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters, but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself. American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.


Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the "New Psychiatry"

Prozac, Xanax, Halcion, Haldol, Lithium. These psychiatric drugs--and dozens of other short-term "solutions"--are being prescribed by doctors across the country as a quick antidote to depression, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other psychiatric problems. But at what cost?

In this searing, myth-shattering exposé, psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D., breaks through the hype and false promises surrounding the "New Psychiatry" and shows how dangerous, even potentially brain-damaging, many of its drugs and treatments are. He asserts that: psychiatric drugs are spreading an epidemic of long-term brain damage; mental "illnesses" like schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorder have never been proven to be genetic or even physical in origin, but are under the jurisdiction of medical doctors; millions of schoolchildren, housewives, elderly people, and others are labeled with medical diagnoses and treated with authoritarian interventions, rather than being patiently listened to, understood, and helped.

Toxic Psychiatry sounds a passionate, much-needed wake-up call for everyone who plays a part, active or passive, in America's ever-increasing dependence on harmful psychiatric drugs.

Edit:
Thomas Szasz is like the ganddaddy of Psych skeptics his opion is worth a look too.

Psychiatry: The Science of Lies


For more than half a century Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life's work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece. Art historians and the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand-physicians, patients, politicians, health insurance providers, and legal professionals-take the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily diseases, systematically authenticating nondiseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and nondisease-genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood-thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain.
There is neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. Individuals and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as "mental diseases" and about medicalized responses misidentified as "psychiatric treatments."
Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds.

Are you a scientologist?

[revelarts]

Are you a scientologist?

:laugh:

no, that's funny.

[Jess]

I guess we are all a bunch of crazies :laugh2:

So ... what's the problem? As long as I get a padded room with a view, I'm good. 3246