When you think of a state that is “good on mental illness,” Texas typically isn’t one of them. There is a good reason for this. In 2010, the state’s mental health system was ranked 49th in the union. Recently, though, the numbers show that something there is turning around. This year the state legislature sent $350 million more dollars into its mental health and addiction treatment services. This has resulted in drastic shrinkage (sometimes all the way to zero) in the waiting lists for those services.
This is good news and is hopefully an indication that the rest of the country will also be stepping up its efforts to improve access to affordable mental health care and addiction services for people who need them but who might not be able to afford them privately.
Eliminating the Stigma
It’s true that much of the stigma that surrounds mental health and illness treatments has been eradicated in recent years. This is largely due to scientists and researchers proving that what presented as optional actually has roots in the biological. For example, according to the Clearview Women’s Center blog, even Borderline Personality Disorder (a condition long thought rooted in environmental factors) has neurobiological origins. Some studies show that the disorder might even be hereditary.
In fact, one of the first things many therapists do (both in private practice and state practices) is ask patients a series of questions about their physical health. Some patients are even sent off for physical exams to find out of hormonal imbalances or other physical issues might be at the root of the problem.
Scoring Political Points
The stigma reduction has not, however, reduced the politicians’ use of mental health and mental illness to score political points and campaign contributions from donors. If anything, this has increased in recent years.
Why?
Some believe that all of the mental illness talk is related to talk about gun control legislation. A recent post in Communities Digital News talks about how most of the mass shootings that have happened in the last few years have been attributed to the gun-person having a mental illness. The post talks about how this, bizarrely, has not only led to more funding for mental health treatment but has led to a relaxing of gun laws around the country.
In other words: gun control lobbyists are getting politicians to say that we don’t need more gun control, we need more help for the mentally ill…and then those same politicians go on to vote down bills that would increase funding and help for those same mentally ill people.
Another theory is that there is money to be made by “Big Pharma” (and, by extension, the politicians it supports) every time someone is labelled as having a mental illness. In “What’s Normal, The Politics of Psychiatric Labeling,” a post published on OpenDemocracy.Net, Peter Whitehouse and Daniel George talk about the increased use of expensive medical neuroimaging tests to determine even tiny variations from a DSM “normal” label—a mark that changes every time the DSM is republished and more “disorders” are considered “mental illnesses.” The post points toward the DSM’s language changes that now allow Parkinson’s drugs to be prescribed for “restless leg syndrome” as evidence of this.
So what do you think is going on? Do you think that politics has co-opted and put pressure on the APA and the ability of a psychiatrist to correctly diagnose a mental illness? Or do our politicians want to classify anything beyond what they deem “normal” as mental illness so that they can point to the invisible “other” and distract attention away from larger issues like gun control and campaign finance.