Americans seeking health care for mental illnesses still had limited access to treatment options as recently as six years after the recession, researchers say. Despite U.S. laws like the Affordable Care Act that were written to improve such access, the financial effects of the recession were profound. A study published on Monday by the journal Psychiatric Services shows that those seeking such treatment faced an uphill battle. “The study creates this picture of people who may have been marginally functioning, who were pushed over the edge and they just couldn’t get back: They couldn’t get jobs, they couldn’t back to the life they had before,” said the lead investigator on the study, Judith Weissman. More than 8.3 million people in the U.S. are likely to have a mental-health problem that interferes with daily life, said Weissman. “There is something very broken about the way we provide mental health care in the country,” she said. The study showed that from 2006 to 2014, the number of adults with serious psychological distress, or SPD, who could not afford medication continued to increase, despite the ACA. The study suggests that “they may not have had as complete an economic recovery as adults without SPD.”