It's mental health month

The National Mental Health Association is promoting its Mind Your Health campaign as part of a month-long effort to educate the public on the seriousness of mental illness.

It wasn't too long ago that we locked people in asylums for suffering from severe mental illnesses. Conditions like schizophrenia, depression, and multiple personality disorder are the result of a chemical imbalance affecting how neurotransmitters communicate in the brain. We've come a long way toward treating mental illnesses such as these as medical disorders rather than personality flaws, but we have much to learn.

Our knowledge of the brain is still in its early stages, and I would love to be around in a few hundred years when our methods of treatment these days will appear primitive. Part of getting there is to convince more people afflicted with mental illness to seek treatment, and for others to take the disease more seriously.

NPR's Talk of the Nation had a good program yesterday on this issue. You can listen to it in their archives.