On the mental health issue, what kind of brought it home to me last year was a mom who's the mother of one of the girls and youth we followed for a couple of years in preparing our report, Connecting the Dots. She looked at me and said that she wished her daughter had had cancer instead of schizophrenia, because then she would know that she would have gotten treatment and help.
To me, that kind of says it all. We look at mental illness in a different way than we do physical illness. We spend a lot of money on physical illness. Your dad was a doctor, I think. We spend a ton of money. I think we compare well--there's a big debate on that--to the rest of the world. Yet, when it comes to mental illness, we don't like to talk about it. Even in families we don't like to talk about it. If someone in our family has cancer, we rally around. We say that by God, we're going to beat this. But if someone has schizophrenia or autism, it's like we're on our own. The same kind of support is not there.
So I think we have to look at mental illness more as we do other kinds of illnesses. I'm sure Michael Kirby will give you a lot to think about in the next few years. He's been given support now much more, and I think that will be helpful. But on the issue of the stigma attached to mental illness and all of that, she said it all in just a few seconds last year at about this time.
I think that's a big challenge. We should be addressing these issues, not ignoring them. We pay the price. We pay the price as taxpayers, family members, and society. Where do they end up? They end up in Brian's place, or they end up in prison, where it costs $100,000 a year for not treating them, and they'll come back over and over again. We see that in our office every day.