MYTH #1: Mental illness doesn’t affect the average person.
No one is immune to mental illness. In fact, you probably know someone who suffers from a diagnosable and treatable disorder. The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health recently learned that one in five Americans has some form of mental illness in any given six months. That means between 30 million and 45 million people - possibly your friends, family members and co-workers - suffer from symptoms that can be effectively treated. Psychiatric problems affect people of all ages, from infants to the elderly. They occur in all income groups, in urban and rural areas and in all religions.

MYTH #2: Children don’t get mental illnesses.
In reality, 12 million children--infants through 18-year-olds--can and do suffer from diagnosable psychiatric disorders such as depression, attention deficit disorder and pervasive developmental disorders. Serious depression, once thought to be an illness reserved for adults, is now known to affect one in 50 children. Every day, 18 young people kill themselves, making suicide the third leading cause of death among youngsters.

MYTH #3: People never recover from mental illness.
In reality, as many as eight in 10 people suffering from mental illnesses can effectively return to normal, productive lives if they receive appropriate treatment. While learning about various mental illnesses, scientists have discovered effective specific medication and psychotherapies and restore patients to normal happy lives.

MYTH #4: All mentally ill people are dangerous.
Look around you as you ride the city bus, commuter train or as you drive to work. Is one out of every five brandishing a knife and threatening fellow passengers or drivers? Is one of every five pummeling a fellow human being? Not likely. Yet statistically one of every five people you see is suffering from a diagnosable and treatable mental illness. In reality, people suffering from mental illness are no more violent than someone suffering from cancer, diabetes, heart disease or any other serious disease. Many psychiatric patients are terrified of the world that they withdraw from others.

MYTH #5: If you have mental illness, you are crazy all the time.
When people think a mental illness, they conjure the images of a person tortured by the demons only he or she sees or the voices no else hears. This, of course, is the version of mental illness that most of us have developed from movies and literature. If mentally ill people always acted “ crazy “ all the time, you’d see “crazy” behavior in one out of every five people you met on the streets or in yourwork place. In fact, the lack of “crazy” behavior makes mental illness hard to recognize by its victims and their families and friends.

This information was prepared as a public service by the American Psychiatric Association
www.psych.org