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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Today Is World Mental Health Day

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Friday, October 10, 2014   

MADISON, Wis. - According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, at any given time, 19 percent of the state's population suffers from some sort of mental illness, and 4.6 percent have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

Today is World Mental Health Day, and Dr. Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, says much more needs to be done to help people experiencing mental illness.

"There can be more resources, too – other things that impact mental health," Peterson said. "Just access to health care, which is improving but still has room to improve; and other things like jobs, housing and things like that certainly impact mental health, too."

Dr. Peterson believes people really don't understand the size of the mental health concerns in the U.S. and points out it's an issue which will touch virtually everyone.

"A majority of us will, at some point in our lives, deal with it on our own – and almost certainly, somebody close to us will," says Peterson. "It's important to remember psychiatric illnesses are medical illnesses, that they are treatable, and they should be treated as such, and not hold people with a stigma or separate them because of mental illness."

Regarding the stigma so many people associate with mental illness, Dr. Peterson says we're getting better at understanding the brain and understanding mental illness can affect anyone. But he says we have a long way to go to remove the stigma now attached to people with mental illness.

This year, the World Mental Health Day focus is on schizophrenia, and to educate people that it is a treatable disorder. Dr. Peterson says there's still a lot of work to do to extend education about another realm of mental illness: depression. It's not just someone who's sad about something.

"So, they'll attribute it to that or they'll say, 'Well, of course so-and-so was depressed, he just lost a family member,' or 'he just had a bad diagnosis,' says Peterson. "People can be sad or have a difficult time after things like that, but it's really not the same as what we specifically refer to as depression."


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