Mental Health Refore What It Would Really Take Essay

Mental Health Reform: What It Would Really Take In today’s society there is a greater awareness of mental illnesses. With this greater awareness one might assume that there would be a substantial increase in government involvement or funding in the area of mental illness treatment. Unfortunately this isn’t the case in the U.S. today. There are hundreds of thousands of people with mental illness that go untreated. These potential patients go untreated for many reasons. These reasons are discussed in the Time article â€Å"Mental Health Reform: What Would it Really Take. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;The article gives some examples of what has happened to people that have not received mental treatment due to lack of government funding. These†¦show more content†¦She is advocating an increase in government funding to improve access to care for others. She would also like employers to help by providing equal insurance coverage for mental and physical health. Currently insurance plans can charge higher co-payments for psychaitric visits than for other medical care. I feel that even if the proposals become law it’s only the first step to fixing this problem. The article discusses some promises made by Kennedy in 1963 to subsidize mental-health services in every community. Kennedy signed a bill to create as many as 2000 community health centers, there are just 740 today. The insurance companies might feel a little better about supporting mental-health if they were presented with some comparisons of successful treatment between psychiatry and physical medicine. One such comparison given in the article is that 60% of those treated for schizophrenia can be successfully treated, while just 41% of those that have angioplasty can recover fully. There is a huge number of mentally ill that are homeless because they’ve gone untreated. They often turn to illegal drugs to ease there pain and confusion. In my opinion this problem should be addressed quickly. There are confused mentally ill people that have been forgotten about by society that a re roaming the streets. These people can un-knowingly commit horrific crimes such as the man discussed earlier that pushed the women to her death in the New York subway. The