Mental Health’s Growing Grip on American Wellbeing
More Americans than ever are suffering from mental health and substance use issues, and the problem only grows worse each year. Unfortunately, a poor understanding of the pervasiveness and depth of the crisis facing hundreds of thousands of people limits the willingness to tackle the issue.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you’re unfamiliar with how affected we’ve become by burgeoning emotional troubles and inadequate access to care, we’ll share some key stats from NAMI. And we’ll dive into what MHT has found through digital behavioral health screening conducted by clinics and doctors that use our platform to test and monitor their patients’ health.
20% of American adults experience mental illness each year. Only half of them receive treatment.
17% of children in America experience a mental health condition each year. Once again, only half receive treatment.
Testing and treating our youth is critical: Half of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14. Three-quarters of all issues develop by age 24.
It takes an average of 11 years from the onset of mental illness symptoms until someone receives treatment.
122 million people live in Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, meaning using technology to expand accessibility and efficiency is crucial to addressing America’s behavioral health crisis.
It’s clear that the mental health edifice is simply not equipped to deal with the size and scale of this problem at the moment. Mental Health Technologies’ platform, SmarTest™, screens and tracks a range of behavioral health issues; we’ve found a striking amount of people tested for a mental health or substance abuse disorder—the majority of whom want help. Our data comes from dozens of our partner clinics across the United States.
Here’s what we’ve found:
For all patients taking the standard depression questionnaire through our HIPAA-compliant (and patented) screening platform, a fifth signal either moderately severe or severe depression.
Of those patients, we ask "if they'd like to learn more about an advanced treatment for their depression." Over 60% of the patients who qualified for a behavioral health referral from MHT’s SmarTest™ platform said, “yes.”
MHT has identified over 20,000 patients with some level of suicidal ideation. Suicide rates have increased roughly 36% since the turn of the century, according to the CDC. Suicide was responsible for about one death every 11 minutes in 2021. That year, an estimated 12.3 million American adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.5 million planned an attempt, and 1.7 million attempted suicide.
Suicide is highly correlated with coincident mental health and substance use issues, which is one of the reasons we promote early, often, and efficient testing. That’s why since 2019, our mission has been to help primary care physicians, behavioral health providers and other healthcare specialists identify, track and refer for behavioral health conditions.
Addressing the shortages in mental healthcare providers is a structural issue which will take years, if not decades, to come close to meeting. Our patented AI/ML technology is the quickest way to make current providers (across healthcare specialties) more able and efficient in treating their patients.
For clinicians, we help send patients assessments, upload results into EHR, notify of high-risk answers and make referrals on your behalf. MHT also tracks and uploads subsequent test results performed by referred specialists. SmarTest™️ tracks both patient and provider progress and outcomes. For clinic managers, MHT increases the per-visit coding for revenue and automatically bills insurers.
MHT’s SmarTest™ platform and AI capabilities are at the forefront of addressing the behavioral healthcare crisis. To learn more about how the MHT service works, you can ask our partners, or contact us here.
Resources:
https://www.nami.org/get-involved/awareness-events/mental-health-awareness-month/
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html
