That's a picture of part of this article:
Mental illness IS NOT like other illnesses. You can do physical tests to determine whether or not someone has lung cancer. If you don't have lung cancer, nobody's going to treat you, physically or in any other way, as if you have lung cancer. Nobody can make other people think that lung cancer is making you think that you're being harassed, stalked and lied about when you're not, or that lung cancer is making you think that there are hidden and illegal cameras in your apartment when there aren't.
People can't say "That's your lung cancer talking" and laugh in your face when you object to being abused. Lung cancer doesn't have a totally unchallenged stigma that devastates your ability to think that your thoughts and feelings don't always need to be validated by someone else for you to feel that you have the right to have them, nor does it make other people think that you're stupid or that you're being unreasonable when you're not.
The article talks about insurance. What insurance businesses stopped doing years ago, and what they ought to do, is pay for at least 50 counseling visits per year, without demanding a diagnosis from the provider. People who aren't psychiatrists SHOULDN'T be able to prescribe medication for their clients, and it should be a lot more difficult than it is for therapists to have their clients medicated. Mental health care should be about restoring and maintaining mental health, rather than telling people that they have biologically caused mental illnesses that they'll have for the rest of their lives. For people to think that they or other people have illnesses that they'll have for the rest of their lives is how the pharmaceutical industry makes money.
Also; cigarettes cause lung cancer.
That's the Google address for "tobacco industry denies cancer link."
There are other things from the New York Times article that I could talk about, such as the grotesque discrepancy between the qualities of mental health care that are consistently available to poor people and rich people (poor people are treated like they're crazy, rich people are treated like they have problems), the lack of knowledge about social and personal contributors to mental and physical health 50 years ago (drinking and smoking, lack of exercise, a bad diet and sexism will make you unhappy).
I'M GOING TO BE EVICTED.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, March 11, 2017 @ 12:13 p.m.
