Center vs. Periphery

4/25/18

Center vs. Periphery

What? It is my understanding that according to Edward Shils’ model center is the mainstream aspect of society. It is the most popular, recognized, and understood. Because of its popularity and recognition organizations and the people within those organizations will fight to keep whatever is in the center in the center. Anything that is outside of the center is on the periphery. Even immediately past the center is the periphery. In mainstream American society, a center belief is the American Dream and the periphery to that would be the countless people who never will obtain said dream due to the detrimental processes of othering. To put it briefly there are a lot of systems in place to make sure that the American Dream is obtainable for a very select few of people.

So what? Two center values that are really important to me are justice and honesty, and I think that it is hard to have one without the other. I’d like to think that I am positively affected by these center of values. I live a pretty honest life and have been known to get reasonably upset at a lack of justice. An alternate center value that is important to me is access to mental healthcare. I strongly believe that everyone should be able to adequately access mental health services whenever they may need them. I think that the services need to be more readily available and also come at a more reasonable price. Through the course of my first two years at Dominican I have had the opportunity to be on a few different sides of the mental healthcare system, and it is astonishing how poor of a system it is in this country. I directly worked for a Psy.D during my freshman year at Dominican, and part of doing work for him was handling billing and payments. Every week when I did the accounting I was continually blown away by how much he and his colleagues were charging for services rendered. The base rate for all of them was $140 per session: sessions were around 50 minutes. Many of the therapists who worked in the group actually charged much higher than that, but I distinctly remember that each therapist had to sign a contract that said that they had to charge a minimum of $140 per 50 minute session. I remember thinking how astronomically high that was, but I found out real quick that $140 was pretty much average for services rendered. I looked into therapy sessions around the Bay Area to see the prices and most of them started between $130 and $150 and went as high as $250 per 50 minute session. Also, this payment was coming completely out of pocket. None of the therapists I worked for last year took insurance. I think part of what was so astonishing to me about these costs was that so many people paid that and then some. A lot of the people coming in for treatment were doing so multiple times a week so multiple people were racking up over $400 in any given week. Also, this group of therapists I worked for really liked to inflate their ego by bragging that they had a community counseling program that charged clients based on a sliding scale: basically means that the client would pay what they could. That’s dandy, but what this counseling program consisted of was interns who had little to no experience. And I strongly believe that people who cannot afford to receive mental health services get the short end of the stick in situations like this. How is it fair that people who aren’t wealthy can only seek treatment from programs like this? Only the wealthy are allowed to have fully licensed and experienced therapists. Personally speaking, I would not want to see someone who has no experience. I know that every therapist has to do their time as interns, gaining all the experience hours and what not, but if I’m only paying $30 per session, I’m probably only going to get $30 worth of therapy. I think this is where the vicious cycle that is the mental healthcare system is perpetuated. When people have a thought process like mine then they wind up paying a ton of money for services or they don’t receive any services since they can’t afford $140+ worth of therapy. So the periphery here are people who for one reason or another cannot afford to receive therapy, counseling, help, etc. they truly need.

Now what? I think the community I work with has a center value of family. I wouldn’t say that family is necessarily an alternate center though. I think every community of people holds family in a high regard and sees them at the utmost importance, so instead of saying that family is an alternate value that has the potentiality to marginalize this community, I think that family is a commonality that has the potentiality to resist further marginalization. Throughout the semester the seniors at group would share stories about their families, and it seemed to me that the biggest reason they visited Vietnam was for the sake of seeing family. I also think the seniors at group had a combined value of fun, games, and competition. Whenever we played card games or picture or any kind of games they all got so competitive and into whatever we were playing. I remember those days the best as they were some of the most fun. This value of fun, games and competition seemed to level the playing field in that we were all there at the very moment to win. It didn’t matter who we were or where we came from, but we are all just players of the game. Once again, I think this value had the potentiality and proved it’s potentiality to resist marginalization. It felt like when we were playing games the whole room relaxed, shredded whatever front people were trying to put on, and became a place of commonality.