Whaaat?

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

I just watched the local news. I had not expected to blog about it. However, nothing on the news was nearly as amazing, provocative, and in need of commentary as the “public service” advertisement suggesting that “one in four people has a mental health issue.” Okay, think about that. Stand in a public place and count: one, two, three, mental health issue, five, six, seven, another one. Go to a restaurant tonight and wonder which of your fellow diners (or maybe your waitperson, even worse the chef or sous chef!) has mental health issues. Look around your office, the grocery store. Imagine one in four drivers with mental health issues there in the traffic jam with you. Standing in a security line at the airport? One, two, three, mental health issue, five, six, seven, yet another one.

About twenty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association estimated that one in five Americans had mental health issues. (Interesting side note: Also according to the American Psychiatric Association, only 17% of the prison population had mental health issues.) About twenty years ago the brilliant psychologist, James Hillman published a book he called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and the World Is Getting Worse. It appears he was really on to something.

So, as more and more people take psychotropic medications and go to therapy, it appears that the US population has more mental health issues??? Whaaat? Doesn’t seem like the treatment is working…or???

Now let’s look at this with a bit of distance and logic. Firstly the dramatic ad provides no criteria for the term ‘mental health issues’—just one in four of us has them. So, noticing that the percentage of Americans with mental health issues has increased by 25%, either we’re all a lot nuttier than I think, our culture is completely in the gutter, therapy and medication don’t work very well, or someone is trying to sell something.

If one quarter of the US population really and truly had actual mental health issues, what would that mean for the country at large? It would imply to me that a rather frightening number of your child’s teachers have mental health issues. And what about Congress? Shall we assume that more than 100 members of Congress have mental health issues (well, you might think that anyway!)?

Why am I making such a point of this obviously fallacious, frankly silly claim? Firstly, we’ve kind of been trained to believe information if it has numbers attached, never mind from whence the numbers are derived (or made up??). Secondly, the belief that so many people have mental health issues feeds the mill of psychotropic medication prescriptions and may help to provide work for the burgeoning population of undereducated therapists. Thirdly, what does it say about us as a society if we are, or believe we are, one quarter nuts.

As a professional and as a person with many decades of life experience, let me just weigh in to remind you that true mental illness is, in fact, extremely rare. Kids and adults have varying degrees of difficulty managing their world—that is a long way from having mental health issues.

I’ll be posting on this topic more and more in the coming days. Stay tuned.