One in five adults in the US experience mental illness.
Despite being a developed country, the US remains to be one of the most depressed countries in the world. World Health Organization (WHO) data shows some alarming signs of the poor state of mental health care in the US which require immediate attention.
Taking into account the quality years of life lost due to disability or death, the US ranked third just after India, and China, for unipolar depressive disorders. The metric measures the overall burden of diseases.
It is estimated that approximately one in five adults in the US experience mental illness in a year and one in 25 adults experience serious mental illness that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.
But, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), only 41 percent of adults in the US with a mental illness receive medical care. About 62.9 percent of adults with serious mental illness receive mental health service.
WHO has also found that India, China, and the US are the countries most affected by anxiety, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.
NAMI data show that about 1.1 percent of adults in the US live with schizophrenia, while 2.6 percent of them live with bipolar disorder.
Expensive cost of health care and the insufficient number of health service providers are cited as the important reasons for the country’s poor performance in healthcare statistics. Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had released a plan to revive the mental health sector of the US.
According to WHO data, Asia bears the highest burden of mental illness mainly due to the insufficient number of psychiatrists in the countries in the continent.
“In 2014, 45 percent of the world’s population lived in a country where there was less than one psychiatrist to serve 100,000 people,” said a WHO report.