Joe Biden’s making the rounds today to announce a $100 million boost in funding for mental health treatment. Half of the money will be going to the Department of Health & Human Services, and the other half will be allotted for the Department of Agriculture, who will be focusing on infrastructure for rural areas.
And it’s about time. The administration wasted most of the year pushing for gun control, which was never going to be a solution, instead of giving us the “conversation” we’d been promised. Now I hope we’re ready to talk about it.
More than 1 in 4 Americans will suffer from mental illness at some point. Stigmatization, neglect, and over-prescription of mood-altering drugs have long exacerbated the problem. President Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act in 1980, but President Reagan repealed it within 30 days of taking office. At no point in the following three decades did we see any significant effort to fix our ailing system.
Will doing this prevent violence? Possibly. Even if it doesn’t, it puts us on the way to improving the quality of life for millions.
(The banner is from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a group that does outreach, awareness, and suicide prevention work.)