Miss Diagnoses

Anyone who has ever looked up a “serious mental illness” like bipolar disorder has been smacked in the face with dire warnings and frightening statistics about misdiagnosis. If you google my lifelong companion ADD, you’ll see lots and lots of dire warnings and hand-wringing about overdiagnosis. But you won’t run into are dire warnings, frightening statistics, and hand-wringing about repeated, compounded misdiagnoses.

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You Can’t Win at the Insurance Game

I am extraordinarily lucky: I have complete coverage health insurance. That means all therapy, lab tests, prescriptions, and other services – even chiropractic – are covered 100%. It sounds too good to be true, right?

It is.

The catch is that it’s a high deductible plan, and while my husband’s employer pays the bulk of the $11K deductible, we pay about $2K.

The Cost of Mental Health

Maintaining your mental health is expensive. Medicine is expensive. Many of the antidepressants are generic now, but still cost about $1/pill without insurance. Lithium is much cheaper at 30 cents a pill. Prices on anxiety meds vary depending on if they are generic or not. But the antipsychotics… woah! I take Geodon, which recently went generic, and without insurance the cost is $379/month! Fortunately I only have to pay $76 because I have insurance. Even Lamictal runs $170/month generic. These are only some prescription prices. What do you pay in supplements that aren’t covered by insurance?

Experiences with Free Mental Health Care

I live in the USA, where health care is not free or taken care of by the state. But I’ve been lucky to experience free mental health care through my university.

In the UW system that I’m a part of, our tuition goes to pay for University Heath Services. A place where basic health problems can be dealt with and referrals can be obtained. When I had a back injury, I went there to receive free x-rays and a lot of vicodin for the pain. It’s free and open to the population of students and graduate students. Some 30,000+ people have access and it’s only 2 floors of medical services with labs on one floor. Yet, no lines, hardly any wait.