Hello and welcome to my life full of mental and physical disease.
A little about me is that I am a 20 year old female who loves horses and is majoring in medical sciences to be a doctor one day. Oh, I also don’t have a colon. Since I turned 17, I have been diagnosed with three autoimmune diseases. An autoimmune disease is when your body attacks itself. So, one could say that my body as a whole hates itself. This however doesn’t stop when you get to my head.
Unfortunately, because all these things happened to me, I have spent an exceptional amount of time in a hospital. With so much time in the hospital I was assigned a therapist to talk about everything I was going through. While seeing her, I was diagnosed with anxiety. I never would’ve thought of myself as someone who could have anxiety due to the fact it was normalized in my family and my school among high achieving students. Once I started medication for anxiety, my life changed dramatically. I realized that making yourself physically ill before tests and exams was not normal behavior.
Had I not been required to see my therapist I would’ve continued my life thinking that what I was experiencing was normal which just made me wonder how many other people could improve their lives like I did just by seeing a therapist. However, while starting my advocacy for mental health I met a lot of people who said they would see a therapist but their insurance doesn’t cover it. Of people with mental illness, 72% of them reported a structural barrier to receiving the care/treatment they needed (Walker, 2015). For people who have insurance, finding a therapist within your network is difficult enough but even if you find one, chances are that they are too full to accept new patients. Even if you can get past that barrier and medicine or treatment seems to be what the therapists recommends for you, insurance companies hire their own doctors and claim that these medications and treatments aren’t “medically necessary” and therefore don’t require the insurance companies to pay for it.
With all the stigma around mental health right now, seeking help is hard enough to do on its own but once you add in the barriers created by insurance companies to access this treatment, many people still may not get the treatment they need. I would have never known that I was mentally ill had I not been forced to see a therapist and looking back, that was the best thing anyone could have done for me. I still talk to my therapist consistently and it improves my mental state every time I leave appointments with her. My hope for this world is that one day therapy appointments will be a yearly or twice yearly required visit such as a physical. I believe that the overall mental health of the country and world would improve with this tactic in place. The first step to getting there is to make psychotherapy, medication, and treatment more accessible by all via insurance companies expanding coverage.
I was and am very fortunate that my family has wonderful insurance that allows me to receive these treatments and see my therapist. However, when I think of how privileged I am for my ability to see a therapist I become both sad and angry because I think everyone should have the opportunity to take care of themselves including their mental health and insurance companies shouldn’t be able to determine who can and can’t see a therapist and improve their overall self.
