Efforts to understand and remedy the conflicts within the psyche of the mentally ill has gained momentum throughout the United States’ past decades. The government’s first attempts to better understand and remedy the situations that mentally ill people face can be dated back to Harry Truman’s presidential term. Under his presidency in 1946, the National Mental Health Act was passed and advocated for the creation of research facilities like the National Institute of Mental Health. From that point on, there has been many considerations and efforts made to give a voice to those that suffer from mental disorders and illnesses.

But through such strides, the United States still faces a flawed mental health system that have affected the country financially and socially. With a system that treats mentally ill patients with more stringent guidelines than those who are afflicted with physical illnesses, both the public and government officials are at a standoff as to how to fix the problem. Many advocates for those that suffer from mental disorders and illnesses argue that more needs to be done. They argue that less people should be turned away when they seek treatment and existing programs such as Medicaid and Medicare should be less discriminatory towards the mentally ill patients. Many advocates put strict program policies such as a limited stay in hospitals for psychiatric care at the forefront their platforms against government action for mental health. Such policies have forced many mentally ill patients to not seek the treatments they need because it is too much for them to pay, thus causing those that need help to carry on in society despite their afflictions.

Although there are policies that seem discriminatory to those that are mentally ill, strides made by politicians have helped in increasing the accessibility of treatment opportunities to mentally ill patients. One example of such a action is the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equality Act, or MHPAEA. The idea behind the act is to eliminate certain discriminatory policies found in private insurance companies and equalize accessibility to treatment to all that seek it. As of now, the parity act has not drastically changed the policies of dominating programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, it still has caused reevaluations in costs so insurance holders to change.

Even though actions is being made through politicians and acts, there is still so much that can be done when there is not enough funding to support more change towards aiding the mentally ill. If programs were to provide the same funding for mental health-oriented treatment, then this could increase programs expenses immensely. This would cause a problem considering that mental health services have decreased by over $5 billion dollars in certain states between 2009 and 2012. With a decrease in funding, hospitals and psychiatric treatment centers have had to decrease the amount of hospital beds available to patients, thus increasing and overcrowding the amount of people in in a hospital for treatment.  $456 million was estimated to be spent toward paying for mental illness care in 2012 on top of the decreased amount of space in hospitals. With such problems, it can be viewed in an economic perspective that placing more funds towards aiding the mentally ill would just be allocating money to a system that seems to have an outcome that does not seem to have an immediate positive outcome.

There are multiple and political perspectives that must be taken into account when discussing the plight of the mentally ill, but the most prominent aspect of the issue that can be viewed by the public is the problem’s societal toll. With all the awareness towards understanding mental health that has been broadcast and publicized for the public to access, there are still many people that view those that suffer with mental illness in a bad light. The social pressure of suffering from this type of illness, as well as a difficulty in funding, causes some people to not seek treatment, and this in turn causes the castigation of people with mental illnesses to run rampant. When sufferers overcome the stigmatization of their illness and do seek treatment, they are faced with another obstacle in the form of monetary expenses. With the challenges faced in an effort to remedy themselves, the mentally ill are forced back into a cycle of remaining untreated and further fueling the public’s view of this problem in a negative light.

Sources:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/25/stigma-of-mental-illness/9875351/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/timeline/timeline2.html

https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by-topics/benefits/mental-health-services.html