Mental Illness Hit 1 in 5 U.S. Adults in Past Year

A new survey finds that 20 percent of U.S. adults over 45 million people experienced mental illness in the past year. Overall, 4.8 percent suffered serious mental illness, 8.4 million people had serious thoughts of suicide, 2.2 million made suicide plans, and one million attempted suicide, according to the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nearly 20 percent of adults with mental illness in the past year also had a substance abuse disorder, the report found. The rate was 25.7 percent for those with a serious mental illness about four times higher than the rate of 6.5 percent among people without a serious mental illness,

The survey, which included 67,500 adults nationwide, was released Thursday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Among its other findings:

* Mental illness is more common among jobless people (27.7 percent) than among those with full-time jobs (17.1 percent).

* Women are more likely than men to experience mental illness 23.8 percent vs. 15.6 percent.

* Young adults had the highest rate of mental woes (30 percent) while those aged 50 and older had the lowest rate (13.7 percent).

* Overall, only 37.9 percent of adults with mental illness received mental health services.

* While the use of mental health services was highest among those with serious mental illness (60.2 percent), 4.4 million adults with serious mental illness in the past year did not receive the services they needed.

"Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed," SAMHSA Administrator Pamela S. Hyde said in an agency news release. "The consequences for individuals, families and communities can be devastating. If left untreated mental illnesses can result in disability, substance abuse, suicides, lost productivity, and family discord. Through health care reform and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act we can help far more people get needed treatment for behavioral health problems," she said.

Mom's Suicide May Raise Child's Odds for Later Suicide Attempt

New research out of Sweden suggests that a mother's suicide may influence the risk for later suicide attempts in her children, even more so than the suicide of a father. The research doesn't prove that suicides by parents, either the mother or the father, causes offspring to face a higher risk of trying to kill themselves. And the researchers noted that the number of offspring in the study who ended up hospitalized after a suicide attempt was small.

Still, "pediatricians, surviving parents and educators should be aware of the possible risk and provide appropriate referral sources for these children as needed," said study lead author S. Janet Kuramoto, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2007, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for almost 34,600 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is more prevalent among men, with about four times as many males as females killing themselves.

Previous studies have hinted that the children of parents who committed suicide were at higher risk of feeling suicidal themselves, but it wasn't clear if the problems were connected to the parent's suicide or to the fact that the parent died, whatever the cause, Kuramoto said. The authors of the new study sought to gain more insight. They examined Swedish databases to discover what happened to 5,600 children whose mothers committed suicide and 17,847 whose fathers committed suicide during the years 1973-2003. The researchers compared that data to rates of children whose parents died in accidents.