(May 25, 2017) For many of us, mental health awareness comes from our own experiences as peers or family members, neighbors or associates of peers. It’s personal. For even more of us, awareness is acquired second-hand – from talk about a friend of a friend or from headlines when mental illness makes news. It’s a story.
What is woefully in short supply for all of us are the building blocks of evidence and data that turn personal and anecdotal awareness into a solid cornerstone for public opinion and policy. As this 68th annual National Mental Health Awareness Month nears its end on May 31, it’s worth remembering that mental health awareness will only be as good as the information it is based on and consider how that information can be improved.
What are suicide rates by specific psychiatric diagnosis? What is the prevalence of mental illness among the homeless? How many private psychiatrists in America accept patients insured by Medicaid? What are the direct costs of mental illness to law enforcement and corrections? How long do people with psychiatric conditions wait on average in emergency rooms compared for people with other medical conditions?
In our Office of Research and Public Affairs, hardly a day passes when we don’t set out to answer questions like these about the role and impact of serious mental illness on individuals and communities. Too often, we come up empty-handed because the basic information we need to answer our questions has not been collected in a statistically valid way and isn’t available.
The Treatment Advocacy Center’s effort to analyze the role of serious mental illness in the relatively frequent use of high-cost public services by relatively few people is a case in point. After nearly two years of reviewing research about these super utilizers, we concluded in A Crisis in Search of Data, “the role of serious mental illness in high utilization is largely uncharted and its costs unknown and unknowable at the state or federal level from the data currently being collected.”
Momentum to improve the knowledge base is growing. As our Research Weekly of May 23 reported, the Bureau of Justice Statistics recently overhauled and vastly improved the nation’s database of arrest-related deaths, a tragedy that disproportionately affects people with serious mental illness. The Data-Driven Justice Initiative to break the cycle of incarceration, the Stepping Up Initiative to divert people with mental illness from jails and prisons, and countless authors publishing in innumerable peer-reviewed journals are among those also calling for or developing better data.
A well-informed public and evidence-based public policies require sound information, and there is not enough of it in mental health, especially in association with serious mental illness. Our goal month in and month out is to improve mental health awareness with improved information.