News and Commentary from the

Treatment Advocacy Center

March 2022

Below is a summary of recent developments and compelling news stories from across the country highlighting America's broken mental health treatment system and how to fix it.

Treatment Advocacy Center in the News

Treatment Advocacy Center's Executive Director Lisa Dailey was quoted in Inside Philanthropy discussing the new federal 988 mental health crisis line and how the philanthropic sector can help implement the crisis line, set to launch in July. Read more here.

Treatment Advocacy Center's Policy Director Brian Stettin and board member Randall Hagar were quoted in Capitol Weekly discussing Calif. Gov. Newsom's new mental health care plan and the roadblocks to efficiently implementing assisted outpatient treatment, in an article about California's new mental health care policy. Read more here.

Treatment Advocacy Center Director of Research Elizabeth Sinclair Hancq was quoted in USA Today saying that federal prisons underreport or underdiagnose people with SMI because once such a diagnosis is on the record, the facility in question is responsible for addressing it and providing care. The article was reprinted in Yahoo News. Read more here.

Policy Director Brian Stettin was quoted in for The City explaining the origin of the IMD exclusion. Treatment Advocacy Center's push to repeal the IMD exclusion and urging of individual states to seek waivers was also mentioned. Read more here.

Severe Mental Illness By The Numbers

With help from the Office of Research and Public Affairs, we updated our Serious Mental Illness "By the Numbers" infographic this month. Severe mental illness affects 8.8 million Americans and 4.2 million of them are being left untreated. In 44 states, a jail or prison holds more people with severe mental illness than the largest remaining psychiatric hospital.

An estimated one in four people with a serious mental illness also struggle with a substance use disorder and 169,000 individuals with serious mental illness are experiencing homelessness. But there is hope: average costs for assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) participants, including cost of mental health services, medical treatment and criminal justice involvement, declined 62% in the first year and an additional 27% in the second year after AOT enrollment.

RESEARCH WEEKLY: March 2022 Recap

5.9 million individuals with severe bipolar disorder in the United States

There were approximately 5.9 million adults with severe bipolar disorder living in the United States in 2020. Approximately 51% of those individuals, or 3.0 million adults, are untreated at any given time. For more data on severe mental illness, including updated prevalence numbers based on the 2020 US Census, see our "By the Numbers" page.

Find all of this month's research highlights here.

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