It's Mental Health Awareness week...were you aware

[HereSince1628]

--Mental illnesses are medical illnesses.

--One in four adults experiences a mental health problem in any given year.

--Many people who have a mental illness recover, most of those who don't recover fully can manage their illness with proper treatment.

--The U.S. Surgeon General has reported that stigma, fear of social prejudice that follows being labelled mentally ill, is a major barrier to people seeking help when they need.

--On average, people living with serious mental illness live 25 years less than the rest of the population, lack of treatment is considered the major cause of these lost years of life.

[Mnemosyne]

1. Mental illness = Physical illness, the hardest thing for most to understand. Thanks, HS1628. n/t

[steve2470]

2. k&r nt

[dawg]

3. Along with health care in general, this is our biggest failure as a nation.

Our solution to the mentally ill is to imprison them; or to leave them homeless; or to torment them until they finally *do* it; or to deny them treatment even though they've been paying premiums for years; to abandon them; to sweep them under the rug; to judge them and condemn them; to consider their disease nothing more than a defect in their character.

[HereSince1628]

6. Mental illness as character flaw is quite common

telling people to 'just get over it' is unfortunately very common.

[arikara]

4. Issues around mental illness are vastly underfunded by the medical system

here in BC too. Every year my workplace does a donation drive for a month, its just a drop in the bucket of what is needed though.

:-(

[Fire Walk With Me]

5. "You may judge a society by how it treats its weak."