The National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2009 gave America's mental health system a D rating. When state budgets across the country have needed trimming in recent years, mental health services have often been among the first to go.

"It is not a glamorous issue," said Sandy Pasch, a state representative from Wisconsin. "Mental health is often one of the first things to cut ... it's not one of the heavily lobbied groups."

In the past three years, $4.35 billion for services has been cut from state budgets across the country, according to a report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute. While states are slashing funding for treatment, private care is getting harder to obtain. Mental health advocates say that the number of providers nationwide has decreased in recent years. The ones that do practice often don't take insurance or are all booked up. link

Study: U.S. Leads In Mental Illness, Lags in Treatment

When we fail to treat people who suffer from mental disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, we all lose. The economic burden of associated health problems, lost productivity and lost lives is more than 10 times the budgets now being spent to treat people with mental illness.

Most of the taxpayer money devoted to combating alcohol and drug abuse goes to cleaning up its consequences, while only about 2% of the funding is used for prevention, says a report from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University.

The study found that 96% of the $467.7 billion a year that federal, state and local governments spend on substance abuse is used to deal with consequences such as crime and homelessness.

Of that money, according to the report, governments spend the most on health care costs associated with substance abuse (58%) followed by the costs of prosecuting and jailing the offenders (13.1%).

...and see no one has really come up with an effective way of dealing with it.

You can look through history and see how the mentally ill were treated, too. Do you think just because mental illness hasn't be scoured from the face of the earth that we should just throw up your hands and say, oh well, it can't be fixed and it isn't cost effective try to help.

Treatment can work and does work.  

True, the treatment industry can be a racket.  AA is free and works for those who want it to work.  Betty Ford and Sierra Tucson, however, are very effective (and expensive)--again, for those who want it to be effective.   Money can make a difference.  I would rather have government put money into treatment, even if some of it is wasteful, than put money into prisons, which is completely wasteful.  

It is derived directly from the Italian word "bimbo," which itself is a corruption of the word "bambino," and refers to a male infant or toddler. (The female infant or toddler is called "bimba.")

Case in point, screenwriter Robert Towne both studied and remained faithful to the common English of late-1930s America, while crafting his Oscar-winning original screenplay for the 1974 classic film noir "Chinatown." As private investigator Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson is angered by another customer inside a barber shop when the man openly disparages his line of work in front of others, and he calls that customer a "bimbo" and challenges him to fisticuffs:

BARNEY (the barber): (To Gittes, lathered up for a shave, smiling and self-satisfied.) "When you get so much publicity, after a while you must get blasé about it. Face it, Jake, you're practically a movie star."

GITTES: (Chuckling, and staring outside the barbershop at a stalled car with its hood up, as its driver helplessly watches his radiator boiling over.) "Jeez, Barn, look at that."

BARNEY: "I know, the heat's murder."

OTHER CUSTOMER: "Fools' names and fools' faces."

GITTES: (Startled, and turning while smiling, to Other Customer) "What's that, pal?"

OTHER CUSTOMER: (Holding the newspaper.) "Nothing. You got a hell of a way to make a living."

GITTES: "Oh? And what do you do to make ends meet?"

OTHER CUSTOMER: "Mortgage Department, First National Bank."

GITTES: (Laughing sarcastically.) "Tell me, how many people have you foreclosed on this week?"

OTHER CUSTOMER: "We don't publish a record in the paper, I can tell you that."

GITTES: (Irritated.) "Well, neither do I."

OTHER CUSTOMER: "No. (Slight pause.) You have your press agent do it."

GITTES: (Now angry, and arising from his chair.) "Who is this bimbo, Barney? He a regular customer?"

BARNEY: (Trying to restrain Gittes in his chair.) "Take it easy, Jake."

GITTES: (Breaking free of Barney, to Other Customer) "Look, pal, I make an honest living. People don't come to me unless they're miserable, and I help 'em out of a bad situation. I don't kick them out of their homes like you bums down at the bank."

BARNEY: "Jake, for Christ's sake."

GITTES: (Now directly in the face of Other Customer, who's visibly shrinking back in his barber chair) "Maybe you'd like to get out of that chair, and we can step outside and discuss it."

Quite honestly, I've never really understood how "bimbo" managed to morph in the latter part of the 20th century into a slur that's now exclusive to attractive but slow-witted females, preferably blondes.