this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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It's not the healthcare that bothered me most, although it did.
It's the cognitive dissonance around the unavailability of healthcare in order to avoid anxiety over the fact that a traffic accident can bankrupt you with no relief. Ignoring the risk takes some serious mental gymnastics and basic math failure to get there, but when brought up in this environment - where a TV show about a teacher who has to cook and sell meth to get hospital money is actually a plausible plot where no one actually examines the mercenary care at all and the main character just pays it - it's just a part of their existence.
Not understanding that few other people live like this - cubans don't live like this - is absurd.
Maybe that explains the amount of mental health issues in the population?
It's a much deeper rabbit hole that I can't fully explain and I'm someone who went without menal health treatment for most of my life and I should have been treated in my childhood and wasn't. Up until recently there was a stigma attached to mental illness. Probably because you until the 80s you could get thrown into an assilym and given a labotomy or worse. Lately mental healthcare has become something of a fad. And everybody is trying to see doctors. Mental health physicians are few and far between. Even with health insurance it can be difficult to find one. Some places have appointments booked solid for six months or more. It is expensive. It's roughly $200 (before insurance) to see a psychiatrist for ten minutes just to get a prescription refilled. The deductible you pay with insurance varies, but can still be over $50 or more. You can go to a private practice doctor, but they likely don't deal with insurance. Prescriptions are generally pretty cheap, even without insurance, it depends on which pharmacy you go to. Going to a regular doctor for mental healthcare is generally a bad idea because they don't understand how to diagnose people properly. Giving someone with bipolar disorder an SSRI is like throwing gas on the fire.
Local jails are full of people with undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorders. It would be much cheaper to just give people free healthcare, but there's a lot of mean spirited people in the u.s. also due to mental health issues, no doubt.
yeah idk about this one, it wasn't good but the asylum shit was killed in the 50s from what i can remember. Obviously we didn't do much after that, but it probably wasn't as bad. Most of those people probably just ended up in prison to be honest. Again for lobotomies, it looked like we stopped doing that in the mid 50s, by the 60s probably entirely.
Also the reason mental healthcare sucks is that we don't have enough practitioners right now. It's a bit of a problem.