The landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, commonly called Obamacare, centered anew the reality that not everyone had access to health care and that, comparatively, even fewer people had access to mental health care. The latter continues to owe to the nation’s chronic lack of mental health clinicians but also a failure of insurance companies and health care systems to treat mental health on par with bodily health.
Mental Health America’s review of the first six years following 2010’s Affordable Care Act concluded that the mental health of U.S. youth was worsening. The mental health of adults, according to that 2020 report of pre-Covid-19 American life, had barely changed during those six years, though thoughts of suicide among adults had increased. (The organization’s 2022 State of Mental Health America Report, released in October 2021, concluded that the nation’s mental health situation had further worsened.)
Nationally, roughly 57% of adults with mental illness went untreated during those six years;more than 10% of untreated adults lacked insurance coverage for such treatment. The rates of untreated mental illness among adults varied by state, from a proportionate low of 40.7% in Vermont to a proportionate high of 64.6% in California.
Among youth, for example, with major depression, 59% nationally were untreated, according to the report. The problem was the most severe in North Carolina, where 74.3% of depressed youth were untreated; on the other end of the spectrum, with the lowest proportionate rate, 39.5% of mentally ill youth went untreated in Rhode Island.
Lack of providers, insurance costs and coverage were among the reasons for lack of treatment.