By Walter Armstrong

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 7 (Health.com) — By the time the gargantuan $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill was passed and signed last Friday, it contained a landmark piece of legislation that just might improve—surprise!—the quality of our lives. Dubbed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, the law forces most insurance plans to offer the same coverage for mental problems as they do for physical ailments.

No longer can insurers discriminate against people with bipolar disorder, say, or alcoholism, by providing fewer benefits than they do for broken bones and breast cancer. Longstanding restrictions on mental health and substance-abuse treatment will be lifted, ranging from higher deductibles, co-pays, and out-of-pocket expenses to the automatic cutoffs (typically at 30) for hospital days and therapy sessions.

Hard times, good timing
The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with our moods growing darker daily along with the economic outlook. But while the financial rescue was passed in a single week, mental health parity took 18 years to gain critical mass.

“There’s been a revolution in the science and treatment of mental health in the past two decades,” says Andrew Sperling, the director of federal legislative advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), who helped push the bill through Congress starting with its first draft. As evidence accumulated of the biological basis for diseases ranging from schizophrenia to obsessive-compulsive disorder to addiction, yielding targets for the development of effective drugs, the managed-care industry could no longer justify controlling costs by relegating mental health issues to second-class status.

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