Dear Future President,

In the course of one year, 54 million Americans over the age of 18 are diagnosed with a mental disorder. Despite the fact that most of these diagnosed disorders are anxiety and mood disorder (which aren’t the most severe types of mental disorders), eleven percent of Americans over the age of 18 are diagnosed with a more enhanced form of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia dementia. Mental health facilitation have barely seen the light of day when it comes to good quality treatment. Being shunned into a corner of abusive scientists and an unwanted society.

In the dawning age of mental health exploration, the quality of care for mental facilities were heinous. The staff wasn’t properly trained to fit the needs for the mentally unstable, and the budgets for government ran facilities were next to nothing. With a combination of these two factors, mental facilities were used to shun the social outcasts. To set aside all the bad eggs from the perfect batch. This became a cultural bad habit; leading to an extreme amount of intake in patients. With an extreme amount of intake of patients, the facilities didn’t always have enough room to house everyone in separate rooms, this lead to putting many unstable patients in rooms with other unstable patients. The government didn’t do an adequate job giving these people fair treatment, methods to treat these patients were usually led by an unnecessary consumption of drugs (in the form of pills), shock therapy, and when it came to punishment, they would isolate patients down to secluded concrete cells just like in jail. The effect of this action would worsen one's mental health disorder because of the isolation. To only be surrounded by your thoughts. To be trapped in a perpetual wheel of maddening anxiety and voices inside your head, whispering to you. Now, this was just a snapshot of what the mental health department looked like in its early birth. Today on the other hand, there has been little achieved to give these patients a quality form of care in which they might truly get better from. Some of the main issues today consist of the same problems when treatment first started: Not enough room for patients who don’t have a high income (many hospitals are now personally ran, so the quality of care you want to receive depends on how big your bank account is), the next issue is how we are treating the mental illnesses that have incarcerated our fellow Americans. Back in the beginning, punishment was usually a form of therapy in which would involve beating, isolation, or any number of other torturous devices. This form of therapy would be inflicted because of the way the patients acted. They did not heal in a positive surrounding, they began to become worse because of the treatment and care untrained workers enforced around them. This leads me to my question future president. What will you do to further the quality of care for mental patients in the United States?

Sincerely, Gino Pacifico

Sources

Nami mental health organization

http://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers

National mental health statistics

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/index.shtml