26% OF THE US POPULATION IS EXPERIENCING MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS?

The Holy Inquisition was regarded as we today regard the practice of psychiatry. A heretic was a very sick man. He was much to be pitied because he held a false view he was doomed to suffer forever in the most exquisite torture chamber ever imagined. Think of entertaining that idea as seriously as we regard ... schizophrenia today. We feel that in curing a person of disease almost anything is justified: ... people undergoing shock treatment; people locked in the colorless, monotonous corridors of mental institutions not knowing if they will ever get out because they cannot understand what is expected of them, and the psychiatrists do not know either. It is kind of Kafka-like nightmare. We think these ... psychiatrists are very good people, that they are righteous men working to alleviate human suffering. Well, they thought exactly the same thing about the Inquisitors. In all good faith, they knew that witchcraft and heresy were terrible things, awful plagues imperiling people's souls forever. Any means were justified to cure people of heresy; and we have not changed. We are doing the same thing today but under different names. We can look back and see how evil that was, but we cannot see it in ourselves.

When reforms are needed, the phrase "There is no reason to reinvent the wheel" is often given to prevent reforms and maintain the status quo. While the wheel does not need to be reinvented, periodic maintenance, including checking the alignment, rebalancing the wheels, and checking the pressure and wear on the tires to see if they need replacement, is required. This needs to be done in the mental health system as soon as possible, preferably today.

Drugs have played an important role for many who have received a mental health diagnosis, but most of the scientific advancements made outside the field of pharmaceuticals have largely been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed by many in the forefront of the mental health system, causing needless suffering by many. Recovery from mental illness should and can be the norm while the prevention of the various mental illnesses is within reach, but it cannot and will not happen as long as drugs are the primary—and often the only—option considered.

Mental Disorders Are Common

Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.

When applied to the 2004 US Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.

Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion—about 6 percent, or 1 in 17—who suffer from a serious mental illness. In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the US and Canada. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity.

We are at a crossroads: One path leads to greater cooperation and harmony among the peoples not just of this nation but of the world. The other path leads to greater conflicts and disharmony with individuals, nations, religions, and corporate entities insisting they are superior to all others and therefore have the right to impose their will on all others.

There has been much research in various scientific fields regarding mental health. While there are differences in approach and perspective, nearly all agree that it is a combination of factors that produces good mental health.

Psychology originally focused on the ego and unconsciousness as the source of anxiety and stress, which meant that anxiety and stress were considered a product of social conditioning. On the other hand, neurologists have followed a trail that leads to the interaction of certain parts of the brain as a source of the emotions, while physiologists focused on the role of the nervous system in stress and anxiety. Yet another group of researchers—psychobiologists—focused on the neuropeptides and other chemicals generated in the brain and transmitted throughout the body as a major contributor to stress and anxiety ... it's becoming increasingly clear that these different routes of research into how we experience stress, anxiety, and trauma are leading us to the recognition that body and mind are intricately linked.

Overlooked Medical Ailments in Psychiatric Populations

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV), cautions against using the manual in a cookbook fashion, yet many in the field of mental health use it exactly that way. The problem of overlooked medical ailments in psychiatric populations was so significant that by 1988 the California legislature mandated an exploration into a means of reducing the risk of missed medical conditions. Lorrin Koran, MD, of Stanford University was tasked with leading the development of a corrective procedure. The results of his team's work were reported to the California Department of Mental Health and local mental health programs in 1991 as the Medical Evaluation Field Manual.

The mental health system had detected 58 percent of test-group patients with a disease at a cost of $230 per patient. Many mental health programs are not staffed with physicians practiced in medical diagnosis and thus are unprepared to detect a large proportion of physical diseases in their patients. As described elsewhere, California's state mental health programs fail to detect many diseases that could be causing or exacerbating psychiatric disorders.

The Koran Algorithm

The Koran screening algorithm has several appealing characteristics:

1. It is limited to those findings that best predict the presence of physical disease in a sample of patients cared for within the California public mental health system.

2. It saves the effort and expense of gathering data that may not help in detecting physical...