The High Costs of Mental Illness

As anyone who’s been in healthcare longer than roughly 10 minutes can attest, mental illness is a major component of what drives people to access the healthcare system. Due directly to such illness or indirectly to attendant woes like behavioral problems and unstable personal situations, its sufferers turn up at high rates in our 9-1-1 systems and hospital emergency departments. There they account for a lot of costs that could potentially be prevented with better care beforehand.

It’s not a small problem: In an average year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in four adults—around 61.1 million Americans—will experience a mental health disorder. These occupy a spectrum of severity, but roughly 13.6 million of us—one in every 17—live with serious mental illnesses like major depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. More than 9 million have concurrent addiction problems.

On large these people are not well treated. Only about 40% of adults with mental illness received mental health services in the last year—African-Americans and Latinos at about half the rate of whites, and Asian-Americans at about a third. The lost earnings stemming from serious mental illness exceed $193 billion a year.

Even worse, NAMI reports, adults with serious mental illness die an average of 25 years earlier than other Americans, due largely to preventable and treatable medical conditions.

That’s plenty of reason, then, in this era of care integration, to seek stronger linkages between mental/behavioral and physical/primary care health services. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s a ripe moment to grow it. These linked articles from the January edition of IHD examine a pair of best-practice approaches to blending them.

The Mind and Other Matters examines the integration of primary care services into Missouri's behavioral health homes. 

The Body and Beyond looks at how Cherokee Health Systems adds mental health care to clients' primary care. 

How are services being integrated in your area? E-mail John@IHDelivery.com with your thoughts and feedback.