Part of the problem of finding competent care happened in the early 1960s, when the solution to abuse in mental hospitals was deinstitutionalization of patients and the decommissioning of the hospitals. The clinics which were supposed to provide treatment for patients never really materialized. And since mentally ill people are not as a rule stupid, they can blend in and suffer quietly, or not so quietly.

It seems to me it's time to open mental health in-patient facilities on a larger scale, affordable for regular people, so that we can have a training ground for medical and nursing students, and psychologists, interested in learning in a clinical environment. We also need more research in physical psychology and drug therapy.

Giving people meds and turning them loose without consistent follow-up is a rotten idea, but for some people it's the only game they have a ticket to. I know a family -- the mother is a close friend -- whose child was a freshman in college, went to the clinic there because of depression, and was given medication with no follow-up. The kid vanished, to turn up a week later in a fugue state on the Pacific coast, coming down off the medication, having intended to commit suicide (a now known side effect of antidepressants in young adults). Fortunately, with the medication wearing off, this no longer seemed like a good idea, and they had had the same phone number since the kid was in kindergarten...

20% of us need mental health treatment at some time in our lives. Yet, as a country, we're too cheap to fund it, and we're afraid of the illnesses and those who have them.