President Obama’s budget proposal will include $235 million in funding for new mental health programs, focused initiatives to help schools detect early warning signs and train thousands of new mental health professionals.
The not-so-good news:
Obama touched briefly on the importance of expanding mental health services in a Monday night speech on gun violence.
I already divide the world into people who get it and people who are clueless. There’s an additional very small category of people who are scared of me, and it doesn’t help that my diagnosis of bipolar II requires all sorts of footnotes to explain that it’s not the scary bipolar I variety. (“Oh sure, I have tuberculosis, but it’s not the infectious type.”)
Would be nice if public awareness could be raised without scaring the hell out of them first.