“The Cost of Not Caring” found that the USA pays a tremendous financial and human cost for ignoring the plight of those with serious mental illness and failing to repair the nation’s broken mental health system. I wrote four of the nine parts of this series and I’m including these four in my beat reporting entry. While three ran in print in 2014, the last ran only online. Both citizens and lawmakers often conclude that fixing the problem would be too expensive. In fact, we showed that ignoring the problem is far more expensive, costing the USA at least $444 billion a year, mostly through lost income that people could have generated if they had been healthy. Nearly 600,000 Americans with serious mental illness a year end up homeless, incarcerated or dead from suicide. The USA has chosen to accept a “default” mental health system — made up of emergency rooms, jails, homeless shelters and city street — rather than a functioning system. We examined what happens to people because of this failure, devoting cover stories to places where people end up: jail, city streets, with overwhelmed family members, the morgue. The country doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, however. There are many cost-effective — and sometimes even cost-saving — solutions. Yet the USA chooses over and over not to use them.”
