By Susan Braider
I feel as if I am banging my head against a wall whenever I stop to think about the way the United States approaches the mentally ill.
I read the other day that it costs about $1.3 million dollars for a heart transplant operation and $10,000 a year for the immune system suppressing drugs the patient will need to take for the rest of his life. That HUGE sum does not include the post-operative care a person with a transplant needs after his surgery.
Never again is he just a patient, or just a heart patient, he now belongs to a rarefied class because he is a heart transplant survivor. I wonder how much does that cost?
We have been confronting the reality that there may not be enough ventilators and respirators to keep alive while patients’’ fight a coronavirus attack on their lungs. The process of deciding who is and who is not going to receive treatment with a ventilator is called triage. Triage involves the review of numerous criteria that include age, weight, medical history, and so on.
This is the rational way of making an arduous decision and it is dramatically different from the way American policy makers manage the limits on the funds available to treat all Americans with mental illness.
The decision is not based on how acute the need for treatment is. It does not include a consideration of whether the patient will survive his illness. It does not include whether the individual is willing and able to take an active role in his treatment.
No! No! American policy makers appropriate a mere 5% of the total health care budget to behavioral health, mental health, addiction, and alcoholism. When they need to make cutbacks it is the first line to be reduced cut and it is rarely restored.
Those who struggle with serious mental illness know that the government does not give a good God damn about us. How did we become worthless to society?
That is a question I keep asking. While there was concern about the opioid crisis before the onset of the pandemic there was minimal concern about the growing mental health crisis with the rising rates of suicide, drinking, drugging, and loneliness, as well as the ever-increasing burden of unmet needs for adequate and appropriate psychiatric care for the sickest among us.
The stress, anxieties, losses that are we are all enduring now have led more than half of the adults in a number of surveys to report that the virus is affecting their mental health. I am not surprised because even with the array of management techniques I have learned since my first psychotic break in 1971, there are moments when I feel as if I am losing it, or that I will drown in my well of loneliness, or my anxiety level is going into the stratosphere.
Nothing is being done for us. Over the years I’ve learned several stress management techniques that help. These techniques are meditation, mindfulness, visualization, and prayer.
There are widespread efforts to encourage everyone to use these techniques. There are calls to make minor modifications to Medicaid and Medicare, but nowhere is there any suggestion as to how the mentally ill should manage the confusion, loneliness, and isolation that accompany many of us wherever we go. There are insufficient promotions of hotlines for people who need someone to talk to. There are no new walk-in clinics devised so that those with serious mental illness can get care while maintaining the social distance to us all.
Perhaps, when we have made our progress through this pandemic, the Americans who neglect the mentally ill as a matter, of course, will remember how much it can hurt.
I hope that enough Americans experience with mental illness during this pandemic will lead them to demand that our government be as generous to the mentally ill as they are to those with physical medical conditions.
Most Americans have no appreciation that if people with serious mental illness receive treatment and rehabilitation in a timely manner, the curve that traces the increase and death from mental illness can me flattened and then reversed. The rising incidence of mental illness is a man-made, society made phenomenon and, therefore, it is inexcusable.
