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Addressing a national tragedy: primary care/behavioral health coordination is key to improving--and extending--consumers' lives.

Article Excerpt
As a healthcare specialty, behavioral health-care has an obligation to foster not just healthy minds, but healthy lives too. After all, our struggle to help people with mental illnesses and addictions recover would be futile if their very lives were endangered due to unattended chronic medical conditions. Yet today we are confronted with a national tragedy that has assumed alarming proportions--the premature deaths of persons with serious mental illness.

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While we have known for years that persons with serious mental illness die younger than the general population, recent studies have revealed that the rate of morbidity and mortality has accelerated. Persons with serious mental illness are now at risk of dying 25 years younger than the general population, compared with 10 to 15 years younger just two decades ago.

This tragic finding most recently was featured in Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness, a technical report from the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD). The report looks at state studies comparing the mortality of consumers of public mental health services with the mortality of the states' general population using age-adjusted death rates, standardized mortality ratios, and years of potential life lost. The findings corroborate what we...