The subject again and will always focus on US gun laws. Lots of folks making lots of money talking “pro” or “anti,” getting elected to power-filled offices, or writing books and appearing on talk shows on this platform. Here’s what never gets discussed: the culpability of the American Medical Association and the drug companies.
To see a qualified psychiatrist in the USA, the cost is anywhere from 100 to 350 dollars per hour. If said psychiatrist prescribes medication–anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, etc– that medication costs hundreds of dollars per month. Medical insurance should cover it, you say? Most insurance companies will only pay for a very limited number of sessions, enough to perhaps diagnose the patient’s problem, write it down, where that information stays sealed under patient confidentiality. And then–that’s it—nothing more. Unless a pychiatrist can show strong evidence that a patient is a danger to himself or others, that patient is free to walk. But not even a genius of a therapist can draw this conclusion after only five sessions, the average paid for by medical insurance. And this is if you can get a troubled person to see that medical professional. People over 18 can stop treatment or decide never to go.
Then we have our drug companies who add to the problem. Once a medication goes off patent, drug companies come up with more expensive, “better” alternatives, which are not always better–in fact, quite the contrary— and which they market to the psychiatric professional community, often providing perks for prescribing said new medication instead of the less expensive off patent or generic medication. Either way, we’re still not talking pennies.
Most people who suffer from mental illness, schizophrenia, depression, and more, cannot afford to have their problems treated, despite The Affordable Care Act, an act which has been fought over, bastardized and rewritten (with the help of health insurance companies). As it stands now, the Affordable Health Care Act offers little financial relief.
In short, there are over 310 million of us in the USA, over 200 million of them are adults. And some of us among that number have serious mental illness that too often remains untreated. It’s not only the expense, it’s the stigma that stops people from going for help. It’s only in certain parts of the country that “having a therapist’ gives one the same social cache as having a Porsche. In most parts of our country, in our many ethnic subgroups and subcultures, mental illness is a thing for a family to hide and to be embarrassed by, and for the individual suffering from it, it’s a thing to be ashamed of or ridiculed for.
I won’t mention our gun laws because that conversation has already been and will continue to be hammered to death. What I will mention is the number of heartbroken, desperate parents I came across in my teaching career—both here in the US and overseas—who hid the mental illness of their teen, either because they couldn’t afford to treat it, because there weren’t any treatments available, or because they feared they and their child would be ostracized and shunned. Some simply couldn’t accept it. (“Not my son. He’s just eccentric.”) There were way too many of these parents and pupils, and I still see all their faces when a thing like this happens.
Yeah, yeah, yeah—“individual rights,” “we shouldn’t have socialized medicine,” doctors have a right to get rich,insurance companies have the right to make money.” Blah, blah, blah. Heard it all. Heard all the “we live in violent times,” pontifications and all the Second Amendment fears. All the blanket statements have been stated, haven’t they?
Yet, when have we ever heard the mentally ill discussed nothing but dismissively, or solely to assign a stigma, or as the convenient brunt of a joke?
Someone to mock. Someone to be avoided. Someone not to give a raise or a job or an opportunity to. And to the medical community and the insurance companies, (with some exceptions, I grant you) they are a someone who will make them heaps of money.
As a result of this cruel, ignorant and shortsighted way of thinking, there are now ten more of us who no longer have any “individual rights” at all because they’re dead. There is now another stunned family who can’t believe, (or perhaps always dreaded, somewhere deep down) that their loved one could perpetrate this hideous act.
We need to show more attention, more care, more compassion, more support for the mentally ill. Not just because mental illness can strike any human being or because it’s the compassionate thing to do, but because no matter how our laws change, this will continue to be the result.
But let’s just keep talking only about the guns.
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