Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit disorder (ADD), post-traumatic stress disorder . . . once these were terms heard only in a medical school lecture hall or on the psychiatric floor of a major hospital. Now they are dinner table conversation, the topics of television features, and first-person stories in the Sunday paper. The human mind—sick and well—became the focus of scientific research, media exploitation, and political attention when Congress declared the final decade of the twentieth century the Decade of the Brain. In 1996, with popular and political interest fixed on mental health, Senators Peter Domenici and Paul Wellstone decided the time was right to introduce their Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA). This act established parity between the annual and lifetime benefits that employees suffering from mental illness received and the benefits received for...