Word: mental
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though tragedies like this one make headlines, the real shock is what happens to the vast majority of mentally ill people. Most Americans with mental illness simply aren't treated. Of the 2 million who suffer from schizophrenia, for instance, more than half receive substandard care. Only a third of those with serious depression receive any treatment. Reformers have tried to call attention to these problems for years--former First Lady Rosalynn Carter has been an advocate since the '60s--but the mentally ill have a powerful new ally...
Tipper Gore, wife of the Vice President, has organized a first-ever White House conference on mental health, which takes place next week. Gore, who disclosed in the run-up to the conference that she was treated for depression in the early '90s, has prodded her husband's boss to ask Congress to spend more money to treat the mentally ill. President Clinton backs a bill in Congress to force employers to help too by providing equal insurance coverage for mental and physical health. (Currently, insurance plans can charge higher co-payments for psychiatric visits than for other medical care...
Even if all the proposals become law, they will represent only the first steps in solving the crisis of the mentally ill. There's not much political benefit to pushing the cause of people with mental disorders, and over the past 30 years governments have done little to fulfill a promise made by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to subsidize mental-health services in every community...
Instead, communities have hired a lot of police, and today cops are the primary care givers for most of the unemployed mentally ill. That's because 200,000 of them are homeless, according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, an advocacy group. Another 200,000 are incarcerated, usually as a result of petty crimes. Fewer than 70,000, on the other hand, live in state mental hospitals. And according to a study by Maryland researchers, less than 10% of Americans with schizophrenia are treated in the smaller community programs envisioned by Kennedy-era reformers...
...would take billions of dollars. The state of Virginia alone would have to spend $500 million to begin providing adequate community treatment, according to a 1998 report prepared for it by consultants. Virginia's Governor, Jim Gilmore, has proposed spending $41 million instead. The Clinton plan would increase the mental-health grants that go to all states by just $70 million next year, to $358 million...