News and Blog

The percentage of American adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) increased to 4.5 percent in 2017, up from 4.1 percent in 2016 and 3.5 percent in 2012 when Gallup began tracking the measure. According to Gallup, “the expansion in the number of Americans who identify as LGBT is driven primarily by the cohort of millennials, defined as those born between 1980 and 1999.”

More than ten years ago, a major milestone in the treatment of mental health disorders was reached when President George W. Bush signed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) into law. The legislation, commonly known as the federal parity law, requires most insurers to cover illnesses of the brain, such as depression or substance use disorder (SUD), just like other illnesses of the human body, such as diabetes mellitus or cancer.

Alzheimer's is a brain disease that causes a slow decline in memory, thinking, and reasoning skills. An estimated 5.8 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease (AD). By mid-century, the number of people living with Alzheimer's dementia is projected to grow to almost 14 million in the United States, fueled in large part by aging baby boomers. AD is already the sixth leading cause of death in the US.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder affects more than 5.7 million adults in the United States each year—that’s about 3 percent of the population. The typical age of onset is the late teens or early twenties, and a history of depression is common in people diagnosed with bipolar. 

The early onset means that a lot of research is focused on young people. In about 10 percent of patients with bipolar disorder, however, the illness develops after the age of 50, and 5 percent of admissions to geropsychiatric inpatient units are for bipolar disorder.