Mental Illness What Everyone Needs to Know®

Mental illness touches nearly every life in some capacity. More than 10% of the world's population is personally affected by a mental disorder at any given moment in time, and some estimates indicate that more than a third of us will have a diagnosable mental disorder at some point in our lives. Yet, mental illnesses impact more than just those with the disorder; they also exact a heavy toll on family, friends, colleagues, and caregivers, as well as society at large. In fact, five of the top ten most debilitating and costly diseases in the world are mental disorders. As such, mental illnesses pose an enormous and unique public health problem; to effectively combat this problem everyone needs to know the basics. Mental Illness: What Everyone Needs to Know® reflects the massive efforts being made by scientists and clinicians to better understand and treat mental disorders. In turn, more of this new knowledge must get into the hands of consumers of mental-health services and the public at large. This book bridges this gap by distilling the deep and intimate knowledge held by mental health researchers and professionals into easily digestible facts for the lay audience.

Nikima M. Glatt is a licensed, board-certified family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner who specializes in providing psychotherapy and psychopharmacologic treatment to teenagers and adults with mental illnesses and complex trauma histories. She has practiced in adult and adolescent outpatient services, hospital-based consultation-liaison services, and emergency departments. Prior to her career as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, she worked for a decade as an emergency room nurse and a sexual-assault forensic nurse examiner. She also is an entrepreneur, as owner and operator of the Cultivating Resilience online therapeutic community ( www.cultivatingres.com), where she offers free nationwide mental healthcare and resilience-building resources to the traumatized and others in need. Stephen J. Glatt is an experimental psychologist and genetic epidemiologist. His vision is to identify the determinants of mental health and mental illness, and to develop interventions founded on those discoveries. His research identifies risk and resilience factors, biomarkers, and mechanisms of brain disorders. He runs numerous grant-funded research projects and has published over 180 studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuropsychiatric Genetics and is a frequent reviewer of grant proposals for the U.S. National Institutes of Health and other federal and non-profit agencies at home and abroad.