But there's also a very good chance that the individual at hand will try to kill or hurt themselves or others around them

In response to Dans post, I keep thinking of the situation of a desperately miserable artist with mental disease who happens to create great art in their momments of lucidity... While the rest of society might benefit from their creative output, it's possible these artistic minds might have led very miserable lives themselves. While mental disease might have fuelled their creativity, in the end many of these people ended up committing suicide (especially if they had bipolar disorder). A good example would be Van Gogh, who lived a pretty miserable life by many standards and was not famous when he was alive. After his death, his paintings became very renowned and valuable. It's almost as if society has a sadistic voyeur mentality when it comes to mental disease.. E.G. "Let these people live miserable, fucked up lives, and when they kill themselves we can trade around the fruit of their labours for copious amounts of money!"...

Originally posted by MOONDANCER...




The Prevalance Rate for schizophrenia is approximately 1.1% of the population over the age of 18 (source: NIMH) or, in other words, at any one time as many as 51 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia;
This means only the people who were diagnosed

What Percentage of Individuals with sever mental illnesses are untreated, and why?

Recent American studies report that approximately half of all individuals with severe mental illnesses have received no treatment for their illnesses in the previous 12 months. These findings are consistent with other studies of medication compliance for individuals with schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder). The majority (55 percent) of those not receiving treatment have no awareness of their illness (anosognosia) and thus do not seek treatment. Stigma and dissatisfaction with services are relatively unimportant reasons why individuals with severe mental illnesses do not seek treatment.

The 45 percent who acknowledged that they needed treatment (and thus had awareness of their illness) but still were not receiving treatment cited many reasons for this. These included (respondent could check several reasons):

32% "wanted to solve problem on own"
27% "thought the problem would get better by itself"
20% "too expensive"
18% "unsure about where to go for help"
17% "help probably would not do any good"
16% "health insurance would not cover treatment"

you probably know more then one person

Originally posted by LITTLE SARAH...

there's ALOT, that's a ridiculous statement