Advocacy

The U.S. mental health system is broken.

Fifty years of systematically limiting access to treatment for mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder have left countless individuals and families with nowhere to turn when a loved one needs care.

The system is dysfunctional from top to bottom.

• At the federal level, 50 years of treating mentally ill adults separately and unequally have left countless individuals with serious mental illness without access to treatment or hope for recovery.
• At the state level, outdated laws too often restrict access to treatment until people become dangerous to themselves or others, while state hospital beds have been eliminated almost to the point of extinction.
• At the county level, half the counties in the United States do not have a single mental health professional within them, much less one of the community mental health centers meant to replace the state psychiatric hospitals of the 1950s.

The human and economic cost of this neglect has been catastrophic. People with the most severe psychiatric diseases make up barely 3% of the total population, of the total population, but are vastly more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, homeless or unemployed.