I Am Not Broken

Per the NIH, prior to the pandemic, 26% of the population of the United States had a diagnosed mental illness. During the pandemic, the estimate was 50% of the population had a mental illness. 

Suddenly, people have this idea that they know about mental illness simply because they experienced depression and anxiety. They wear their depression and anxiety as if it were a merit badge. 

I have this to say to them: You don’t know anything about mental illness. 

Has your health insurer limited the amount of mental health care you can receive? Has your health insurer made the cost of an emergency room visit for a mental health crisis double the cost of an emergency room visit for a physical health crisis. Has your health insurer told you that you need prior authorization in order to go to the emergency room when you have a mental health crisis?  Have you panicked after learning Medicare won’t pay anything until you spend $1500.00 out of pocket. And after the out-of-pocket limit has been reached, Medicare has strict limits on what Medicare pays for mental health treatment. 

Have you spent days when you couldn’t stop crying and your meds weren’t working? Have you experienced an all-consuming, heavy, black depression? Have you had to go to work every day while you spent three months adjusting to your new meds which are working a whole lot better than your old meds? Have you planned out how, when and where you will kill yourself? Have you had a doctor say you show no sign of depression after you disclosed you want to kill yourself and you brought someone with you to the appointment because you might need someone to stop you from buying a box of bullets on the way home? Have you ever had to ask someone to hide your guns so you couldn’t shoot yourself in the heart?

Has your supervisor, insisted you go back into the closet and never again mention you have a mental illness? Has your supervisor told you that you’re crazy? Has your supervisor dared to tell you that he doesn’t like the medication you are on? Has your supervisor demanded you see a psychiatrist as a condition of your employment? Have you discovered upper management is having private meetings about how your mental health is effecting your employment without ever talking to you? And you accurately determined upper management was looking for a reason to fire you?

Has a psychiatrist ignored your concerns about the side effects of a medication and told you that you’re on a good medication? Has a psychiatrist told you, after you say that the dose of an antidepressant is working well, ignored you and doubled the dose of your medication? Have you tried to tell a psychiatrist that you haven’t slept in two months and the psychiatrist refused to listen to you? 

Has anyone literally backed away from you after you disclose you have a mental illness? 

Have you had to listen to well-educated professionals say that mentally ill people don’t come to court because they don’t know better? Or say that all the normal people should be let out of jail? Or say that the withdrawal hell that happens after coming off an antidepressant that isn’t working is just the depression coming back? Have you been laughed at by a room full of well-educated professionals after saying that lying on the floor while trying to make the walls stop moving and then dragging yourself to the restroom because you had to throw up isn’t depression?

Have you been told to just snap out of it? Or that your problems are all in your head?

Have you had two psychiatrists and four psychologists fail to diagnose bipolar disorder forcing you to live in mental health hell for 40 years? Have you had three school psychologists decide you were more trouble than you were worth and refuse to treat you?

Have you ever felt the need to tell someone you aren’t violent? Or that you aren’t broken? Or that while your brain works differently from theirs you are still normal?

All of that happened to me. 

Until it happens to you, you don’t know anything about mental illness.