Changing Minds - The Greatest Advance in Mental Health

The greatest news in mental health today is not in the psycho pharmacology, although there has been great advancements in the science, but it is in the changing attitude towards mental health recovery, rehabilitation, and programs created to fight against stigma and fight for consumer and peer advocacy. Changing the minds of society, along with the attitudes, has greatly advanced over the past decade.

Significant efforts have been engaged in helping people with a mental illness to remain engaged in and participating in community activities. Patients are no longer placed behind closed doors in institutions without a voice in their recovery. Two significant pieces of legislation have been enacted. Most recently, legislation entitled the “Mental Health Parity Act” now provides greater coverage with HMO's and insurance providers. The bill requires a greater array of insurance options for mental health disease. Another law, enacted several years ago, was the “Advance Directives for Mental Health Treatment.” This law allows people with mental illnesses to plan in advance their treatment, medication and support options before a crisis occurs.

Government and greater society now approaches mental illness differently. This has come as a result of collaborative efforts between government and the private sector, to better educate people about mental illness; to better research and report studies and to acknowledge advances in molecular biology imagery technology that have helped make more effective diagnostic and treatment options.

A significant advance in the mental illness community comes with a fresh approach that provides more peer advocacy and peer to peer support. A strategy to promote recovery communities across America includes the "patient." The "Recovery Communities" encourage active involvement with treatment, support programs and active community involvement. The notion even supports employment as part of rehabilitation and immersion within the community.

These advances come at a painfully slow pace, but still have made a major impact and advancement on mental health awareness. These collective efforts have provided hope where a generation before there was only hopelessness.