" Mental illness is a disease we simply cannot treat well at this juncture. There is no surgery to reverse, no medications that cure, no therapy that eradicates. "
Beast, at two years shy of a half century working in behavioral health, I agree with much of your comment on the state of care for these brain-based illnesses. What you do not mention is the role of stigma, short-sighted government funding decisions, and family enabing in keeping so many of the affflicted from reaching their highest potential level of independence and social adjustment.
There are many reasons we have reached the point as a nation where the largest mental health residential service program in the country is the LA County Jail. Not least among them is the massive irresponsibility of the mental health and substance abuse care systems in spending billions of poorly monitored federal dollars on precious interventions to serve the "worried well" (President Carter finally shut the spigot feeding the trough) and clinical ideology wars that were self-absorbed to the point that no one saw who the patients really were.
Still, rehabilitation and recovery support do work, are a lot less sexy than cures and a lot more work, and give people help to call and places to go, that don't involve guns or social isolation. Somehow, several decades ago I was able to get a beautiful quintilingual clinical psychologist to say yes to a marriage proposal and along the way we have visited behavioral health programs in many countries, on this continent and in Europe. The difference between the integration of care (recovery and rehabilitation) in to the cultural and economic life of the community is striking, with other countries doing what seems a much better job of holding their behaviorally disabled citizens in need within the fabric of community life.
I serve on the board of an agency that hosts a NAMI chapter and have done family and community education about behavioral illnesses for all of my years in the field. Both the anguish and courage of families with afflicted members is overwhelming, taking us to the depths of human suffering and the heights of who we are at our best. Most of us who count ourselves lucky with healthy immediate family, if we think for a minute, immediately come to the name of the closest relative who is behaviorally ill, and realize that there but for fortune go you or I.
I apoligize for a response that is way too long and self-involved but I don't live far from Newtown and my grandchildren are the age of some of the slaughtered babies. I guess the bottom line here for me is that each of us needs to get to work in our own garden to clean this mess up as best we can.
