Many of us think about mental health when we’re having one of those days that stresses us out. We also tend to think about mental health when we’re feeling depressed or blue. But many in our society view people with serious mental health issues as people who are hard to understand, mysterious, and perhaps even scary.

Mental health is a serious issue, and an issue that needs more education and more compassion from our society in general. As you’ll read in the excellently written article provided by our feature columnist, Linda T. Curtis, in Michigan, there is much more we need to do to help the mentally ill in our midst.

Recently I was reviewing the state statistics for Michigan on the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) website. Consider these facts as listed on the NAMI website, www.nami.org:

• As of 2010, there were close to 348,000 adults living with serious mental illness in Michigan and also 112,000 children.
• In Michigan, our public mental health system provides services to only 25% of our seriously mentally ill.
• Nationally, we lose one individual to suicide every 15.8 minutes.
• Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death overall. In young adults 15-24 years old, it is the third leading cause of death.
• In 2008, approximately 11,700 adults with mental illnesses were incarcerated in our Michigan prisons.

Statistics have a great way of letting you know important information in a snapshot. You can easily grasp the information and become informed. But as you’ll discover as you read the feature article this month, what is often lost in a statistic is the human tragedy and pain of the individuals, families, and communities that make up a given statistic.

Each one of those nearly 500,000 individuals living with serious mental illness in our state has families and other people who love them. Each one of those individuals needs help of some kind.

When you are reminded, like you are in the feature article this month, that behind the numbers of statistics are real, living people with real challenges and issues that need to be served and helped, it changes how you view those numbers.

At some point along the way when you’re dealing with a problem, whatever it may be, it simply stops mattering as much how you got where you are with that problem. What matters more is what you’re going to do now, moving forward, to help resolve it. That is where I believe we are right now in our state with our need to do more to serve our mentally ill population.

I don’t have all of the answers for how we can improve, but you can be sure that now that I know more about where we really do stand, I will be doing more to help serve this need. I hope you will too.