I am a middle-aged wife and mom of three, a friend to many, and an auntie (by blood and by not) to a gaggle. I am also neurodivergent with a trauma history a mile long. I tell my boys (ages 26 and 16) that we don’t make serotonin or dopamine in this family, we buy the equivalents at the store. Better living through chemistry.
I come from a long line of self-medicating undiagnosed neurodivergents who did and have done the best they could with the knowledge and access they had but it wasn’t pretty. I have worked hard to destigmatize medication, mental health days, and diagnoses, and embrace our exceptional brains instead of fighting them.
That being said, I am so very frustrated with our medical system. I switched doctors and had a well check in November, did requisite bloodwork for my thyroid meds, etc. When I went to refill my antidepressant last week, it was declined because I needed to come in for another office visit.
That in and of itself would be fine if we didn’t live in a dystopian late-stage capitalist hellscape where it costs $150 out of pocket for an office visit because the deductible is $6k and the company doesn’t pay for anything aside from a yearly wellness check and requisite immunizations until you meet that cap. You also get charged roughly $600 a month for the pleasure.
That sort of plan is the only plan many Americans have access to because it is what is offered through W-2 jobs. People could look on the marketplace but because their job offers a plan for the individual who works for the company (not the family they may have at home) that is .01%-ish less than 10% of his gross pay. There is no such cap on family plans.
Even for an individual in a city where the average rent is $1600 and even a one-bedroom or studio starts at about $1200. In a city where the average individual gross income is somewhere between 36,000 and 40,000 that 10 percent even for an individual is expensive, especially for what amounts to a catastrophic coverage plan.
So, I went around and around with my provider’s office about the fact that I had just been in for a well check in November but they refused to fill my antidepressant unless I put an appointment on the books and would refill it past this refill if I didn’t come in. So, in essence, my mental health was being held hostage based on my ability to come in for an appointment during business hours and have the money to pay for it.
Now, this clinic does have a sliding scale fee and they do accept payment arrangements but that doesn’t negate the fact that my medication was being gatekept based on my incurring some kind of debt or fee. I understand that clinicians have to check in on their patients, and I understand that prescriptions are monitored for a reason.
However, this isn’t Adderal or Xanax or anything. It’s goddamn Welbutrin. I would love to be able to go to the doctor every time I probably should but given the world that we live in where we are the “greatest nation on Earth” and yet the cost of healthcare is prohibitive, there has to be a better way.
So while there were phone calls on phone calls where none of them could give me a straight answer as to why I had to come back in even though we had discussed the medication and the fact that I had been on it for 2 years now at my visit not even 3 months ago, aside from “policy.”
That was after I had requested my refill from my pharmacy in a timely manner and waited a few days (they are severely understaffed,) and had to find out from the pharmacist, not my provider that it had been declined because I had to schedule an office visit. In the idle of all of this, I didn’t have the medication that helps keep me Earthside for 4 days.
Dear reader, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to cold turkey off of a psych med before but it sucks donkey balls. I do not recommend it. I had to do it one other time about 14 years ago and refused to go back on meds until about 2 years ago because it was so awful and I didn’t want to take the chance of going through that again.
Yet the show goes on. Work and kids and house chores still need to be taken care of while feeling like I want to jump out of my skin but also just crawl in my bed and hide. I got my refill finally on Friday but my brain is still pretty messy right now.
How is it exactly that we are supposed to be a destigmatizing mental illness and just chronic conditions and illnesses in general when we force people to undergo undue stress, either in tasks or financially or both, in order to do so? Let’s not even start on what people have to go through to afford their insulin or other direly necessary medications and treatments.
People die in this country every single goddamned day because in this country healthcare is allowed to be a for-profit venture. Because as historic as the Affordable Care Act was, it was kneecapped from the start by the insurance lobby and greedy lawmakers. Lawmakers who have easy access to healthcare, and the means to make use of that access. The rest of us plebs get to just figure it out.
