Although a largely "invisible" condition not easily discernible at a glance for most, mental illness is, indeed, a disease every bit as real as cancer or diabetes and if it is severe and/or protracted enough, it requires medical intervention to be cured or managed.

There's an unfortunate stigma that if you suffer from a more "common" illness such as depression or anxiety disorder, especially, you should be ashamed of it and should hide it or should "buck up and just get over it already." Yet, just as you wouldn't think you should simply get over leukemia by yourself and absolutely need medical treatment for your best chances at recovery from it, so, too, do cases of more severe and protracted mental illness such as clinical depression, for example. Even so-called "mild" cases of mental illness, such as acute but temporary depression or a mild case anxiety, if protracted, can benefit from at least temporary intervention, such as a brief course of medication, to "get over the hump" and begin to feel better.

The National Mental Health Institute (NMHI) states (using 2004 US Census figures) that approximately 26.2% or 57.7 million people suffer from some kind of mental illness. About 6% have a serious mental illness. Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in the United States today for people from 18 to 44 years of age.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank and Harvard conducted the Global Burden of Disease study and found that mental illness and its sometimes-resultant suicide accounted for 15% of the burden of disease in developed countries such as the United States.

The NMHI conducted the National Comorbidity Survey - Replication (NCS-R) in 2005 and found that the most common disorders in a 12-month span were of some type of specific phobia, such as claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) or arachnophobia (fear of spiders, the most common phobia) at 9%; social phobia, 7% and major depressive disorder, 7%. The most common disease categories were anxiety disorders, 18%; mood disorders, 10%; impulse control disorders (such as the "intermittent explosive disorder" sometimes seen as a component in road rage), 29% and substance abuse disorders, 4%. In terms of disorders that are seen as "chronic" and lasting the lifetime of a given individual are anxiety disorders, 29%; mood disorders, 21%; impulse control disorders, 25% and substance abuse disorders, 15%.


Although the above figures are focused on adults, children and adolescents, too, suffer from mental illness. Although it is normal for children to be moody and "depressed" to a certain extent, especially in the adolescent years as they deal with the myriad of pressures going on in their lives as well as hormonal, growth and other physical changes, children and adolescents do, indeed, suffer from serious mental illness requiring medical intervention and this has become a much-needed focus in the last two decades.

The Surgeon General's 1999 report on mental health states that figures for children are not as well documented as that for adults, but the estimate is that about 20% suffer from some form of mental illness with about 5-9% suffering from what is known as "severe emotional disturbance," or SED.

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