Mental Health America Issues First of Kind Report

Addiction Treatment Industry Newswire

12/30/2014 -ATIN – Mental Health America, MHA, a key advocacy group founded over 100 years ago that is the nation’s oldest and largest non-profit group advocating on behalf of the mentally ill, which the group says there are 54M Americans who fit on some point of the mental illness pathology spectrum, has this week issued a key report that is the first of its kind the group says. The group’s president, Paul Gionfriddo, says in the introduction to the report that with passage of the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act as well as The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that it was time MHA reached down into the data, which Gionfriddo freely admits is limited and wanting, and did a report that gave a snapshot of the status of the mentally across all the states. Thus, the group released today its report entitled Parity or Disparity: The State of Mental Health in America 2015.

No Surprises

There were few surprises coming from the state-by-state report, which gave the highest rankings to progressive Midwestern states like Iowa and Minnesota and to Northeastern states that spend relatively liberally on social expenditures like Vermont and New Hampshire. The states with the lowest rankings were to be found in the South and West mainly, places like Mississippi, Louisiana and Nevada. A high overall ranking indicates a mixture of lower prevalence of mental illness and a high access to care, thus a state’s place in the top ten could simply indicate that there were statistically fewer people in that state that were mentally ill and not have much at all to do with that state’s policies or expenditures on the mentally ill.

Link to Report

For those who wish to read the first annual State of Mental Health in America report, here is a link to the report online

http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/sites/default/files/Parity%20or%20Disparity%202015%20Report.pdf

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