Also, I understand the aversion many people have to even the concept of asylums, but the problem is in the implementation, not the concept. De-institutionalization is great, asylums should be an absolute last resort and many cases can be more easily dealt with in out-patient care or medication. But, absolute de-institutionalization means the mentally ill wind up homeless or in prison.
Insurance covers on average two sessions of therapy annually.
Therapy is only effective over long periods (years) of regular (weekly/biweekly) sessions.
It's a fucking travesty.
I spend close to $500 per month, after insurance, for my mental healthcare. This is a therapist and a psychiatrist.
None of this is covered by my insurance.
I pay what I can with an FSA but it's extraordinarily exhausting.
Things are much better (if only because all those big institutions were closed), but we stills see examples.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-held-...
This woman told her doctor that President Obama followed her on Twitter. That's very easy to check, 5 minutes tops. No one checked, they assumed it was a delusion, and she was detained against her will, deprived of her liberty.
The submitted article has some really disturbing parts:
> A technician rifled through Trimble’s purse for sharp objects and then a nurse told her to strip down to her underwear. It was then, she said, that she realized the doors to the psychiatric ward had locked behind her.
> Trimble, who has recently reached a settlement regarding her hospitalization, recalled shaking with fear and “deep, shameful humiliation” as the nurse examined her body, noting the location of any identifying marks. “All you can do,” Trimble said, “is stand there and let it happen.”
There's considerable overlap between "people who've experienced abuse" and "people who have mental illness". You can imagine jut how traumatic this kind of treatment could be to some people.
> Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method — which sometimes meant exaggerating people’s symptoms or twisting their words to make them seem suicidal — and to hold them until their insurance payments ran out.
This is bizarre. There's no shortage of people who would have an actual need for those beds.
The article even indicated this:
Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method — which sometimes meant exaggerating people’s symptoms or twisting their words to make them seem suicidal — and to hold them until their insurance payments ran out.
...
In the 1970s, a researcher sent fake (healthy) patients to asylums. They were loaded with powerful antipsychotics and not allowed to leave until they faked the cures the psychologists expected to see.
When the fake patients were all out the story blew the lid on the American psychological profession, so the psychologists said "bring more fakes, we can sort them out."
The original researcher said "sure."
The psychologists proudly stated a few weeks later that they had weeded out several dozens of "fakes."
There was no second fake cohort.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment