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Hello again, bear with me as I give context to the main point of this post.

As I’m sure many readers are, I am a college kid approaching finals. With the rigor of classes in college only increasing across generations, it is believed that this increase can partially account for the rising mental illness among college students.

Every college kid can understand that the 1-2 weeks prior to finals are almost as bad as finals especially in science majors. Half of my credit hours are constituted of labs and therefore piles of lab reports and practicals make up my last week of classes. I have felt more at peace and relaxed right now, days before finals, than I have all semester.

This semester was incredibly rough mentally and physically on my body. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease about 4 months ago and because of my complicated medical history the doctors are proceeded with significant caution in terms of treatment options which I can understand, however the consequences of that are that I still have many bad days of nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain while the doctors search for a medication that they are comfortable won’t cause any harm with my other medical issues.

With Crohn’s constantly reminding me of my lack of normalcy and a major that requires every ounce of attention I have, my grades have suffered some this semester. I withdrew from a physics course 3-4 months into the class, after I had attempted hours upon hours to learn the material, I made the choice that to get a goof grade in the class and learn the material for the MCAT. However, by the time I withdrew from physics, I had spent so many hours on physics that I was also behind on Organic Chemistry. At this point in my life I was feeling very overwhelmed with everything on my plate with working a job and still riding horses competitively (neither of those were going well either). I felt like I was doing mediocre to poor in every aspect of my life.

All of these things factored into my declining mental health. With everything I have on my plate I will admit that I am not the best at taking care of myself in terms of food, exercise, sleep, and taking/filling medications. For a period of a week, maybe even two, I didn’t refill my Zoloft which is my anxiety/depression medication. Within the span of the week or two I didn’t have my medication my mental health declined rapidly. I didn’t want to get up or move and I cried every day. I had no idea how much my medication does for me until that one or two week span. I was a mess and then once I finally got responsible and filled the medication, I started to think about the people in my last post that couldn’t attain this medication in the first place.

I believe I am classified as having moderate social anxiety and depression. Therefore, there are people out there with it much worse than I have it. If this is how I feel without medication for a week, I can’t imagine what it’s like having a more severe version of these without any medication. I feel so blessed and so privileged to be able to have it. But that’s pretty messed up that the medication I take to make me able to function and feel joy and happiness is not accessible for all people. Especially when statistically, people with low incomes are often the ones with the highest rates of untreated mental illness (unsurprisingly).

I can only imagine the struggles that these people face every day doing daily activities. No wonder these people can’t hold down jobs, or even get hired in the first place. These medications bring out the personality in people that had theirs suppressed by their disease and that should be a right and not a privilege.

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.