As a published author in the United States and the United Kingdom, Joan Landino has influenced many with her thoughts on the stigma of mental illness in United States. Here is an excerpt of published article from priory.com, an online psychiatric journal in England.
Stigma Of Mental Illness Continues To Impede Early Diagnosis And Treatment Of Affective Illness In The United States
Landino, Roy and Buckley
Abstract
Social stigma continues to impede the early diagnosis, specialist care referral, evidence-based treatment, and funding parity of mental illness. Health care professionals, including many mental health providers, mirror prejudicial attitudes about the unpredictability and unmanageably of psychotic disorders, and the willfulness of addictive illnesses.
Stigmatization delays or preempts altogether care seeking among the mentally ill, and engenders ineffectual care of treatable conditions whose annual economic burden in established market economies is 15% of the overall burden of disease, more than the combined disease burden of all cancers.
In the United States alone, fewer than 30% of persons with psychiatric illness seek care and more than 40% of those who seek treatment receive sub-therapeutic care. Social stigma of mental illness is the preeminent impediment to care seeking. General practitioners are uniquely positioned to screen for mental illness and to offer specialty referral. However, in the United States primary care providers fail to detect approximately 50% of all cases of depression. Similarly in the United States, nearly one-third of co-morbid mood and anxiety disorders that present at primary care and obstetric settings go undetected or are misdiagnosed, and primary care providers significantly under-utilize evidence-based treatment. Similarly, psychiatric specialist practitioners lacking advanced sub-specialty expertise fare only marginally better in the early diagnosis and effective treatment of some mental illnesses, as for example bipolar disorder, a chronic and devastating condition which afflicts nearly 2 million Americans, or about 1% of the population age 18 years and older in any given year illnesses with a lifetime prevalence of attempted suicide of 25-50%….
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This is really relevant to research I have been assisting with for advocates of Special Education students under federal and state law. There is a new focus on ED, or emotional disorders. ED has been increasingly diagnosed among students and parents as well as the educational community have increasingly advocated for ED students to receive special education services under state and federal law.
So, today, the stigma is affecting children, who can be reached and assisted at an early age.
This may seem to some as just another crutch for today’s students. However, ED may have been overlooked over the years and may have had a significant impact on the lives of those who have struggled with it. Just as likely, however, is the extent of violence and other societal impacts, which directly affect the students and their respective attitudes to education, its relevance, and the conviction that there is help.
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