Better but Not Well

This book examines the well-being of people with mental illness in the United States over the past fifty years, addressing issues such as economics, treatment, standards of living, rights, and stigma. Marshaling a range of new empirical evidence, they first argue that people with mental illness--severe and persistent disorders as well as less serious mental health conditions--are faring better today than in the past. Improvements have come about for unheralded and unexpected reasons. Rather than being a result of more effective mental health treatments, progress has come from the growth of private health insurance and of mainstream social programs--such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, housing vouchers, and food stamps--and the development of new treatments that are easier for patients to tolerate and for physicians to manage.