EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about Michigan’s mental health crisis on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, IHeartradio and Lessenberryink.com.
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Mental Illness: Michigan’s Exploding Crisis
We are facing nothing less than an epidemic of mental illness in Michigan, and it may be the most neglected and least talked-about major issue in this state.
Epidemic, by the way, is not my word, but Kevin Fischer’s – he is the executive director of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Michigan chapter. They, and other experts, estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are mentally ill in this state who are getting no treatment at all – 670,000, according to the Michigan Health Endowment Fund.
Meanwhile, there are thousands of mentally ill people in Michigan prisons, many of them people who would have been in state mental institutions 30 years ago.
Prison is not an environment suited to helping mentally ill people get better – and severely mentally ill prisoners cost taxpayers far more to house than do other inmates. Many of these people might not have to be in prison if judges were allowed to sentence them to outpatient therapy and mandatory medication instead. Or if we had community mental health centers with the resources available to allow them to treat people properly.
That’s what was supposed to happen, by the way, when state governments began de-funding and closing mental hospitals. Washington was supposed to give a network of community mental health centers enough money so they could take up the slack and deal adequately with our growing mental health issues.
But that never happened.
We are also living in a nation where, while same-sex marriage and racial intermarriage are legal and increasingly accepted, there is still a considerable stigma about mental illness. There are also, as the online magazine Bridge noted last summer, vast rural areas of our state that are under-served, when it comes to having both treatment facilities and mental health professionals like psychologists and psychiatrists. Some areas are simply not served at all.
This is, frankly, a disgrace on moral grounds, and worse than that from a cost-benefit standpoint. Edmund Burke said long ago that all that was needed for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing.
We have become far too good at doing nothing. I know far too many families who have endured the eternal pain of loved ones who committed suicide. I know others who have a family member in prison, not because they are ruthless criminals, but because they are mentally ill, and still more who have spent countless fruitless hours trying to get help.
And no, I don’t know how much it would cost to give every mentally ill person the therapy and treatment they need. But I would bet everything I own that the total cost to society would be less than the cost of continuing to avoid doing what we should.
This is Jack Lessenberry. Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll listen to more of my podcasts again soon.