In 2013, the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 44 million American adults suffered from some sort of mental illness. Of the number, 10 million of those adults suffered from a serious mental illness. That’s 5% of the adults in this country who have to live their lives day to day with something serious and strenuous going on in their brains.

Before the 1920s, mental illness was treated like a sickness rather than a proper health disorder. We threw people into insane asylums or “snake pits” for disorders we now know today as serious illnesses. Fast forward 25 years to President Truman’s signing of the National Mental Health Act when the United States finally began to see that people with mental illnesses are not monsters or crazies, rather people who are sick and need medical attention. In the 30 years spanning from 1950 to 1980, America saw a drastic drop in the number of institutionalized patients living in psychiatric hospitals. This seems like a step up but all we have done is take patients from one place and thrown them into another. It is estimated that nearly 2 million mentally ill people in this country end up in jail every year instead of going to mental health facilities where they belong.

Now, that’s not to say that we have done a completely terrible job of treating the mentally ill. It is definitely an improvement from the olden days when we used to throw women into hospitals for disorders like postpartum depression or chronic fatigue syndrome. More recently, the United States has almost quadrupled its spending on mental health treatment since that of the mid 1980s, with most of the money going towards outpatient treatments and prescription drugs. This all seems well and good but what about the millions of Americans who cannot afford the tremendously costly medicine that would change their lives? Another major problem regarding mental health in America is the negative stigma surrounding mental illnesses. How can we expect people who are in need of medical assistance to reach out for help when they are taught to distance themselves from their illness in order to avoid discrimination and victimization?

I am going to detail the shift from the outdated way of thinking about mental illness to the new, slightly more positive light we shed on the mentally ill and the possible slippage that could happen in the near future.