Malady Inflation? One in Five Americans Had Mental Illness Last Year

I read a shocking story today that one in five Americans experienced a mental illness last year.  From the story:

More than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness last year, and 11 million had a serious illness, U.S. government researchers reported on Thursday. Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest level of mental illness at 30 percent, while those aged 50 and older had the lowest, with 13.7 percent, said the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA. The rate, slightly higher than last year’s 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes of Health, said. “Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed,” Pamela Hyde, SAMHSA’s administrator, said in a statement.

That seemed high to me, and I wondered whether the statistic represented a malady inflation trend I have noticed, that is, in our quest for creating a society in which there is no suffering and no unhappiness, we keep expanding the situations in which one is deemed “ill.”  (I recall one story a few years ago that described grief as a mental illness.)

The source of this study is a federal bureaucracy called the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (Who knew?)  And I wanted to see what, precisely, the study meant by mental illness. (On the way, I saw a lot of boosterism for Obamacare and mental illness, and so wondered whether the study is designed to promote the need for the law.  )

Here’s what I found that “any mental illness” means. From the SAMHS study:

Any mental illness among adults is defined as persons aged 18 or older who currently or at anytime in the past year  have had a diagnosable mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder as defined above, regardless of the level of impairment in carrying out major life activities.

Okay, that means the 1-in-5 Americans is mentally ill stat is alarmist because it includes people who have no impairment of any kind if they have a diagnosable condition.  So, if someone is getting a divorce and receives counseling for the depression that comes with such a loss to help them get on with their life, is that a mental illness?

The key issue, it seems to me, is how many Americans have a mental illness that causes impairment.  As one would expect, this is much lower:

Among adults aged 18 or older in 2009, the percentage having serious mental illness (SMI) in the past year was 4.8 percent (11.0 million adults).

There are, of course, gradations between no impairment and a serious mental illness.  But it strikes me that this is the far more germane statistic, and moreover, that some of the intense focus on our supposedly many dysfunctions is profoundly unhealthy.  Indeed, I sense an effort to make us all feel as if we need help, as if experiencing difficulties or being unhappy is a pathology rather than just life.