I knew there was something I liked about First Lady Rosalyn Carter.   Ms. Carter has been working on improving mental health care in America for the past forty years and has just written a book called, Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis. In an article this week in Time Magazine, Ms. Carter talks about the book and her opinions on the subject of mental health in general.

Ms. Carter points out that approximately 25% of Americans, one out of every four of us, suffer from a recognized mental illness in any given year.  Yet there is still a pervasive stigma attached to seeking and receiving mental health care by a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist.   Those of us in the mental health field know that these figures are actually low and that mental illness affects all demographic and economic strata; how strange and counter-productive it is to live in a culture that stigmatizes at least 25% of its population!  We should all be working on that – it may just be a matter of opening up a little and sharing our stories with more people, I don’t know.

There’re some other compelling statistics in this article: about 100 people commit suicide each day in America, ten of them children.  That’s higher than the national homicide rate.   14% of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD and another 14% suffer from depression.   This is an under-reported fact and needs to be accounted for when people are assessing the actual costs of these wars.

Kudos to Rosalyn Carter for her hard work to help Americans with mental illness!  I, for one am going to buy her book and read it carefully.