A mental health disorder affected 45.9 million Americans in 2011, the newest report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) states. This report took into account adults ages 18 and over. Interestingly, the largest percentage of these individuals fell in the range of 18 to 25 years old. The report revealed that an astonishing almost 30 percent of Americans in this age group suffer from some form of mental illness. The SAMHSA report accounted for mood disorders like depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder, eating disorders, intermittent explosive disorder and adjustment disorder. The report also re-confirmed that women were more likely to suffer from a mental health disorder than men, with the rates being 23 percent for women and 17 percent for men.

Severe Mental Health Disorders

The report also broke down the over 11 million Americans that suffer from a severe mental health disorder, which essentially is when the symptoms of a disorder are so debilitating that with them comes a "substantial impairment in carrying out major life activities." According to the World Health Organization, four out of the 10 leading causes of disability in the US and other developed nations are mental health disorders. Approximately 8.7 million people in the US last year alone had serious thoughts of suicide while 2.5 million made plans to kill themselves and 1.1 Americans actually attempted it. This data illustrates the fact that a mental health disorder is more likely than any other health problem including cancer and heart disease to be the cause of a disability.

The Dual Diagnosis of Addiction and a Mental Health Disorder

It's important to note that SAMHSA's report measured the co-occurrence of addiction with another mental health disorder but for this specific study it did not count substance abuse problems as one of the mental health disorders in question. What we did learn with regard to this dual diagnosis is that individuals who suffered from a mental health disorder in the past year were over three times as likely to also have problems with drugs or alcohol when compared to individuals who did not. A large reasoning behind this connection has always been the notion of self-medication, which is when an individual with a psychological condition will try and cope with the symptoms of their disorder by abusing drugs or alcohol rather than seeking treatment. And since only an estimated 40 percent of sufferers in this country actually seek treatment for their mental health disorder, the rates of a co-occurring addiction could be even higher than we realize.