Why is mental health care basically disregarded by the US government whenever it comes to treating and insuring people?

What makes you say that? I agree as a country in the last 30 years mental health has not been addressed as well as it should be. Some service even have been diminished. But mental health awareness is better now than in the past. It isn’t just the government, the private sector is to blame for how the country addresses mental health.

From what I understand Obamacare has a mental health requirement, but maybe I heard wrong.

Mental health care is not supported for the following reasons

1) Mental illnesses are not as easy to quantify and identify, and therefore more difficult to diagnose and treat. They’re not as straightforward as a blocked artery or a broken bone.

2) Mental illnesses are even harder to ‘cure’ in the sense that how do you know (again, quantify) if the treatment is “working’? How do you know if the funding is actually making a difference?

From a process point of view, mental illness has many unmeasurable inputs, and many unmeasurable outputs. Without the ability to measure effectiveness, the government is reticent to fund a ‘money hole’.

Actually, it will be covered.

Mental Health coverage is part of the Affordable Care Act.

Why do you say this? My father was mentally ill. He had schizoaffective disorder, saw a doctor regularly for it and lived in a supported apartment. He also had a case worker which he saw every week. His Maincare(medicaid)insurance payed for all his treatment and medications. He was very stable because of all the support he had.

Unfortunately, he died suddenly of a heart attack last December.

I think the OP means for a long time coverage was extremely scant—a very small lifetime amount was capped by most insurance companies.

I think this had to to with the mental health insurance scams of the 1980’s. These parents would have trouble dealing with their misbehaving kids. They’d get their kids enrolled in these mental health programs and the kids were basically in lockdown in these hospital wards. They could be in there for months until the parent’s maximum payout for the year was reached—sometimes up to 25k! Then they were “cured” until the new fiscal year came up.

Because of this, insurance companies wanted to cover their assets so clamped down on a ridiculously LIFETIME maximum rather than a generic yearly maximum. Suddenly all of these troubled teen programs hospitals had dried up an disappeared. You don’t hear about parents sending their kids to lockdown in the hospital the way the used to.

Now insurance programs are letting up a bit and allowing more reasonable monetary caps—yearly instead of lifetime for instance. And this is also why therapy has become much more goal oriented than it used to be. In order to get payment, people have to get diagnosed with something specific. They also have to have recovery goals that are solid and provable on record.

This has also made the Freudian analysis “decades of therapy” almost extinct. Which is probably a good thing.

Because the importance of it has been underrated for so long. I’m glad that Obama is taking steps to (hopefully) make it the norm now.

My mom wasn’t diagnosed as bi-polar until age 55, and before that used alcohol to escape her demons, and it just exacerbated them. Early diagnosis by trained professionals is essential.

Check out this read. This law was passed in 2008, and has just never been enacted. It is hoped that the ACA will remedy this.

I have so many horror stories I could tell about my brother’s two-decades long struggle with mental illness, and the nightmare inadequacies of the system, but I can’t even get started. His suicide at the age of 42 put an end to the suffering that doctors and hospitals were unable to relieve. The lack of support for mental patients and their families is appalling.

As with all disease, money is the answer: research and resources, both of which are expensive. Mental illness has been so stigmatized, for so long, that until we begin to see it as a disease just like cancer, it won’t get the attention it deserves from government.

I agree…it isn’t the government’s job.

@Dutchess_III Whose job is it then? Who should pay for it?

Mostly it’s the responsibility of the individuals. However, there are those who qualify for state medical, and that’s fine. I guess I’m questioning why the OP directed the question at the government, and not at the insurance industry in general.

@Dutchess_III Since this OP never returns to questions, we’ll never know.

Why she do that???

@Dutchess_III “Thank you so much for your quick reply.” Implies to me that the test was over/homework complete by the time you got around to answering. If you want to keep her GPA up, you need to answer better, faster.

:)

@ibstubro This jelly asks loads of questions, and never participates in the subsequent discussion. There is always a bizarrely effusive thank-you after the question. It doesn’t seem like a real person.

@glacial Sounds to me as if you’re doing someone’s homework or answering test questions. We had a LOT of that at Askville.

And several of the questions are directly taken from internet Q&A sites.

Yeah, the OP is not writing the questions. I don’t think it’s homework. I think it’s some kind of disorder.

Sorry. What’s OP?

(So, if someone ever accuses me of being afraid of looking stupid, yall have my back, right?(

@ibstubro Original Poster

OP = original poster. The person who wrote the question.

Though occasionally, you’ll find people use it to mean the question itself.

@ibstubro I am left confused. Where did homework and GPA come in?