By Angelica BenekeStaff Writer
In Congress, yet another Republican bill has been making its rounds, wanting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and endanger others’ well-being for the sake of making health care simple. Its name this time is the Graham-Cassidy bill.
Many provisions of this bill are infuriating, but I want to focus on what this bill plans to do with America’s already shoddy mental health care system. With this bill, states would be allowed to drop requirements on mental health care, slash billions of dollars from Medicaid, end Medicaid expansion and cut financial assistance for health insurance.
Children and adults suffering with mental illness would be harmed in the process and many people would be unable to afford medications vital for treating their mental illnesses.
At this rate, even if the bill does not pass, America will continue to fail those individuals suffering from mental illness. Whereas physical illness is a legitimate concern, mental illness somehow is not because “it is all in your head,” as the deniers would say. Although, where else mental illness would be other than in the head is a baffling concept.
To them it doesn’t matter that, according to the National Alliance of Mental Illness, adults in the U.S. living with serious mental illness die on average 25 years earlier than those without, largely due to treatable medical conditions.
It doesn’t matter that half of all chronic mental illness begins by age 14 and that three quarters of these illnesses start by age 24. It doesn’t matter that approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S. experience a serious mental illness in a given year that interferes with one or more major life activities, such as attending school or being in the work force.
Mental and physical health go hand-in-hand, but the U.S. as a nation still struggles with this concept, which is how provisions targeting people with mental illness in bills such as the Graham-Cassidy bill could possibly be conceived.
The country mourns when young people and children with trauma-induced mental illness take their own lives. It grieves when supposedly successful people in the arts, most recently Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, decide this life is too much to bear. It calls for mental health care reform when individuals hold a gun and take innocent lives and it’s revealed they have a severe mental illness. However, after a couple of weeks, the public pushes all thoughts of mental health reform out of their minds until the next related death or massacre.
In the meantime, when someone says they have mental illness they are ostracized, met with pity and shamed by the ones closest to them for mentioning it. Politicians notice and quietly toss aside mental health care reform in spite of mental health interest groups begging for them to do something about the mental health crisis.
Then, the cycle begins again.
We as a nation can no longer afford to deny mental illness as a legitimate illness. If we want politicians to take mental health seriously and stop this deadly cycle, we need to start accepting it as such ourselves.
The answer to “I have mental illness” is not “Just think yourself out of it!” The answer to “I need treatment” is not “But you don’t look sick?” The answer to “I have struggled to just get out of bed” is not “Don’t we all?”
The answer to someone admitting they have a mental illness is simple: listen. Listen to what has been plaguing them. Encourage them to get help by destigmatizing getting help.
Then, maybe then, the government will finally realize that mental illness is as important as physical illness.
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