Thursday, January 13, 2011

trend: mental health focus

This is the best time of year to reflect, read the trend reports and forecast your own. There are a few trends that I’m thinking about, will post more eventually. One that just occured to me is health related. There are always a few major health-oriented things that people talk about every year. A couple years ago it was vitamin D, we’ve had high fructose corn syrup in the spotlight too.
I’ve noticed that as a result of the Arizona shooting, mental illness is getting thrown into the spotlight. 
Lawyer, Victoria Toensing of diGenova and Toensing LLP provides some background:
Cloaked with the aura of enlightenment in the 1960s, lawyers successfully brought suit after suit to release the mentally ill from institutions and to raise the barrier for future admissions. In the main, those released and those who should have been admitted became the homeless. Some who should have been institutionalized became dangerous. Worse, the national psyche became “live and let live.”
Check these out:
It’s interesting because the more we start to talk about mental illness, the more we realize that we know so little about these illnesses. We sweep them under the rug because we don’t understand them. It’s about time we put the broom down. 
Not fully baked on the implications of this one yet. 

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