NEW YORK

THE CAUSE of mental-health parity — equal insurance coverage for mental-health care — is far too important to wait for the results of this November’s elections.

The 110th Congress is a long way from being over, yet when it comes to health care its leaders seem to have lapsed into complacency — contentedly deferring the vital issues of public health and health-care reform to the next administration and Congress a year from now.

Americans simply can’t afford to wait for many of these needed reforms — especially in the neglected area of mental health.

And there’s really no reason for further procrastination. Never before have so many members of Congress — on both sides of the aisle — called for mental-health parity. The time has never been more right nor the opportunity more clear: We mustn’t let the chance for achieving full mental health parity slip away.

For centuries, the mentally ill and their treatment resided at the fringe of society. Too often, patients were dehumanized, locked away entirely from public sight and memory — or put on freakish display to feed society’s fascination and schadenfreude. Today, although mental illness no longer elicits the scorn and derision of past generations, it remains largely misunderstood and ignored.

The aversion to mental illness often is driven by our health-care system and reinforced by the media. We have yet to fully carve out a place for mental-health care within it, and so we think about and talk about mental illness as if it were different from physical illness.

To fully eradicate the last vestiges of this stigma — and to ensure the best possible health outcomes for all members of society — we must elevate the importance of mental health to that of physical health and grant equal access to mental-health benefits. And that will only come when our health-insurance policies grant mental-health true parity.

Twelve years ago, in 1996, Congress acknowledged this fundamental truth by enacting the Mental Health Parity Act. While an important milestone it has produced remarkably few substantive changes.

For far too many people, mental-health coverage still remains subject to the whims of their employers and insurers.

A report by the congressional Government Accountability Office evaluating implementation of the 1996 law found that employers often placed more severe limits on mental-health benefits than on medical and surgical coverage. Compliance with the letter of that law, it stated, still deprives too many Americans of full access to mental-health benefits.

This is unacceptable when you consider that more than 26 percent of adults in America — nearly 58-million people — annually suffer from a diagnosable serious mental disorder. Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability for people ages 15 to 44, and they are the driving force behind 90 percent of the roughly 30,000 suicides and 650,000 suicide attempts each year.

Mental disorders impose a harsh toll on every member of society, not just the one out of four Americans suffering from them. A recent estimate of the global burden of disease revealed that mental illnesses account for more than 15 percent of the overall burden of disease in established market economies like the U.S. That’s greater than the burden exacted by all cancers combined.

Admittedly, mental health is complex. Unlike cancers and infections, there are no lab tests to diagnose problems. And still there are rarely cures, only treatments. Patients with the same set of symptoms may respond to therapies differently, so treatments must be tailored to the individual. Even so, recent studies show that suicide rates drop sharply when more mental-health resources are available, barriers to treatment are lowered and more people receive mental-health treatment.

Providing those resources and removing those barriers to treatment requires legislation mandating mental health parity. The time is now, there’s no rational reason to wait. We must urge Congress to act this year.

Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., is the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and psychiatrist-in-chief at Columbia University Medical Center/New York Presbyterian Hospital ( jlieberman@columbia.edu).