December 8, 2014
Blurb
Liz Szabo - USA TODAY
Two years after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., prompted calls to rebuild the country's frayed mental health system, the drive for change has slowed at the state level and ground almost to a halt in Washington.
"We're seeing less attention to mental health, and that's concerning to us, because we're still seeing so many tragedies every day," says Mary Giliberti, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which released the report Tuesday.
Although individual tragedies may not make the news, "the suffering is tremendous when people don't get the services they need," Gilibert says. "People end up in emergency rooms. People end up in jails and prisons, which is absolutely the wrong place for someone with mental illness."
The increased attention to mental health after Newtown gave many mental health advocates hope for real change.
After the shootings, the White House held a mental health summit and 36 states increased funding for mental health services – an important step toward restoring $4.6 billion in recession-related cuts from fiscal years 2009 to 2013, the NAMI report says.
Only 29 states increased funding this year, however. Seven states reduced mental health spending. In some states, mental health funding is still less than it was before the recession, the report says.
"When you've been through a couple decades of these kinds of cycles, it gets pretty discouraging," said Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who wasn't involved in the new report. "As the memory of these tragedies fade, there is a reversion to a state of indifference." ...
Read the full article here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/09/mental-health-cuts/...
Two years after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., prompted calls to rebuild the country's frayed mental health system, the drive for change has slowed at the state level and ground almost to a halt in Washington.
"We're seeing less attention to mental health, and that's concerning to us, because we're still seeing so many tragedies every day," says Mary Giliberti, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which released the report Tuesday.
Although individual tragedies may not make the news, "the suffering is tremendous when people don't get the services they need," Gilibert says. "People end up in emergency rooms. People end up in jails and prisons, which is absolutely the wrong place for someone with mental illness."
The increased attention to mental health after Newtown gave many mental health advocates hope for real change.
After the shootings, the White House held a mental health summit and 36 states increased funding for mental health services – an important step toward restoring $4.6 billion in recession-related cuts from fiscal years 2009 to 2013, the NAMI report says.
Only 29 states increased funding this year, however. Seven states reduced mental health spending. In some states, mental health funding is still less than it was before the recession, the report says.
"When you've been through a couple decades of these kinds of cycles, it gets pretty discouraging," said Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who wasn't involved in the new report. "As the memory of these tragedies fade, there is a reversion to a state of indifference." ...
Read the full article here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/09/mental-health-cuts/...