In recent years, courageous leaders in the high country have taken bold steps to address a crisis that impacts us each and all. In 2022, NWCCOG will highlight those efforts and encourage action in other communities. I’m talking about a suite of issues known as Behavioral Health which includes all types of mental health and addiction.
Recent news in our region highlights bold moves by public and private leadership. These include Summit County breaking ties with Mind Springs Health and Eagle County approving a new Behavioral Health project with Vail Health to have a campus to go with their ongoing Behavioral Health programming that began with an upheaval similar to what Summit is going through now. This is a public health crisis that was peaking before the COVID pandemic and has only worsened since.
Calling mental health “The Next Global Pandemic” sounds hyperbolic, yet Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup is doing exactly that to “create a new national awareness of this issue…so that this emergent “pandemic” is taken just as seriously as the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The statistics on this overlap in time and from different studies but in my reading from the CDC site, COVID was the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and Cancer in 2020 and in 2021. Right behind it, and the top cause of death for those ages 1 – 44 is what the CDC categorizes as “Unintentional Injury” such as overdoses and car accidents (as well as other deaths which may not be related to BH). This category doesn’t include Suicide which was 11th overall in 2020. That alone is stunning. These different causes of death have changed over the years. Some will find the homicide numbers interesting too. For a graphic of how these causes have shifted positions while increasing dramatically since 1981, I urge you to look at this graph.
For years we’ve treated mental illness as a whispered, individual issue. While it can be privately excruciating, it is also very much a social issue deeply impacted by attitudes and by public policy. Like seatbelts, homelessness, and the cycle of poverty, if enough collective will can be mustered, we can address it. Like those issues, our attitude towards people with mental health—blaming those who suffer is precisely what impedes us.
Mental illness is as common as physical illness. It “happeneth to us all.” If we continue to think that people who are sick, poor or homeless did something to deserve it, we excuse our inaction. Factors impacting mental illness can often be directly traced to policy or our assumption that there is nothing to be done. If you think nothing can be done, contemplate the impacts of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement since 1980 when it began, the movement to prevent the tobacco industry (again now with vaping) from predatory advertising to kids, or Ralph Nader’s unpopular push for seatbelt laws which save lives every second of every day. Allowing Purdue Pharma to flood the market with opioids in recent years was a policy decision to prioritize corporate profit over public safety. Millennials can be forgiven for not knowing a time when every public space and restaurant reeked of cigarette smoke. Policy often doesn’t get it right to start. It needs attention. There is often a balance with policy between individual freedom (or unregulated profit motives), and the common good – think of the failed push for 55 MPH speed limits, or helmet laws for motorcycles. Yet no one argues that we shouldn’t have speed limits or school zones.
For all the hubbub about “Obamacare,” along with preventing health insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, it also dictated that behavioral health be insured as well. This opened the door for providers to address it head-on as they have physical health. A case in point is Eagle Valley Behavioral Health.
The good/bad news about mental illness that it is practically universal. Clifton cites a CDC report from 2021 that reveals that 41.5% of U.S. adults exhibited symptoms of anxiety or depression. That isn’t quite every one of us, but statistically it means just about every household. He also cites Deaths of Despair a book by Princeton economists that calls a significant swath of middle America a “suicide belt.” That book dives into the Why of these maladies which includes people feeling disenfranchised, left behind and impacted by forces beyond their control (but not beyond our collective control). I went right from DOD to reading Tightrope, about NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof’s classmates from Yamhill Oregon. It also happens to be the town where my mother also grew up—and it is heartbreaking. Tightrope is now a documentary.
Clifton says, “Think of deaths of despair as suicide in slow motion.” The bottom line is that poverty, addiction, depression and despair are overwhelming much of the nation. It is not a “red state” or “blue state” issue.
Unlike our national response to COVID, Behavioral Health still has the opportunity to not be wasted to politics. It’s an old saw now to call any investment in social programs socialism, but maybe this one has already touched enough of us that it can escape that tag. It’s a new saw to harass and treat public officials taking actions to protect people as public enemies. I’m sure someone thought that Mothers Against Drunk Driving were public enemies. Certainly corporations thought that about Nader. Maybe even in this divisive environment, we can avoid that too.
We would do well to focus less on what divides us and focus together on combatting a common contagion that is quietly destroying our communities. That didn’t play out so well with COVID, but we have another chance an even more destructive illness. There is no heard immunity to indifference.
