Word: mental
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Scott also has schizoaffective bipolar disorder, a mental illness she keeps in check with a low dose of Zyprexa. If you were to ask Scott, she would say she is a healthy person overall. So she was shocked when the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) published a study two years ago called Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness. The report analyzed data from 16 states and found that, on average, people with severe mental illness die 25 years earlier than the general population. "Hearing that made me so sad," says Scott...
...findings were a bombshell for the rest of the mental-health community. "The study jarred the field," says Dr. Bob Glover, the executive director of NASMHPD. After the 2006 report came out, many mental-health agencies in the U.S. made it an immediate priority to figure out why their patients die sooner and how to improve their longevity. Says Glover: "Mental health has been late to the dance in terms of looking at the connections between mental health and physical health. It may be moot what you're doing for mental-health needs if people are dying so early from...
Indeed, the causes of physical illness and death among psychiatric patients are much the same as those in other groups - cigarette smoking, obesity, diabetes - and are treatable. The problem is that people with serious mental illness tend to be low on the socioeconomic totem pole and often don't get the best available health care. Frequently, their own doctors pay little heed to their patients' physical health. "Medical doctors think, 'Well, they're crazy,' so they don't take their concerns seriously," says Wendy Brennan, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in New York City. "Their...
...most common contributors to early death among mentally ill patients, for instance, is smoking. While about 22% of the general population smokes, more than 75% of people with severe mental illness are tobacco-dependent. According to Glover, a study conducted by NASMHPD after the publication of its mortality study found that 44% of all cigarettes in the United States are consumed by people with psychiatric histories. "I used to run state hospitals, and we'd use cigarettes as reinforcement - 'You did good; you get a cigarette,'" he says. "When people didn't do well, we took away their tobacco privileges...
Obesity-related illnesses, like diabetes, are so prevalent among the mentally ill that health officials call them an epidemic within an epidemic. For example, about 13% of schizophrenic adults in their 50s have received a diabetes diagnosis, compared with 8% of the general population of the same age. In October, the NASMHPD released another report, with recommendations for treating the particular problem of obesity, including giving those with severe mental illness better access to dietary consultations and promoting the prescription of low-weight-gain antipsychotics. The agency is currently working on creating a tool kit for federal health-care providers...