By Frank Zingheim / Chronicle contributor
To call someone crazy is one thing. To call someone a schizophrenic is another thing. You are labeling someone by the type of illness they have, or worse, by some outdated stereotype. Your ill relative is not a cancer, but has cancer. A friend who has heart disease is not referred to as Mr. Heart Disease. The difference is important when you are on the receiving end. Labeling someone can really hurt the individual and it calls attention to the problem rather than to the person.
We are not completely to blame. Many TV “doctor” shows use such language as short cuts in speech; the actors are taught to talk in medical abbreviations and labels. If we use such “quick-speak” ourselves it soon becomes part of our everyday vocabulary and we become insensitive to the damage we may be doing.
The real problem is that in this hurry up world, being “quick” can often lead to dismissiveness, which can lead to discrimination. When people don’t take the time to examine what they say, they do not realize that they may be dehumanizing others. That is what happened in the unfair imbalance between the insurance coverage of mental and physical illnesses for years. It wasn’t until President Bush’s New Freedom Commission interim report in 2002, that mental illness was considered on a par with physical illness. Somehow or other too many people had become dismissive of mental illness. The report began to change what advocates had been fighting against for years, namely mental illness discrimination. But it wasn’t until the Wellstone/Domenici bill passed in Congress six years later that mental and physical illnesses were formally defined as equal. From that time on, insurance companies could no longer discriminate based on a physical illness of the brain (so called mental illness).
What took so long? Stigma. It’s still with us, too. It will still take a few more years for some in our society to “get the word.” The stigma harkens back to the idea that mental illness is a character flaw. That translates into a reluctance to talk about mental health in public and poor funding for mental health care, which imposes additional burdens on persons already fighting a difficult disease.
So we (The National Alliance on Mental Illness) as advocates have a position concerning the current health care debate in this country. We want to move this year on health reform legislation that provides quality and affordable health care for all while reducing the rate of growth in health care costs in the future. Ensure that mental illness treatment is included as part of any required basic benefit package AND is covered at parity relative to medical surgical benefits consistent with Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Furthermore, we must address medical co-morbidities experienced by individuals with serious mental illness through expanded access to primary care and early intervention services.
You can help in this matter by thinking before speaking. Remember, it’s mental illness. If we all remember that, we not only insure that we are talking about the same health issue, we will not offend our fellow citizens who need our help and not our discrimination.
It’s that simple and powerful, not easy, but doable. We are certainly number one in health care spending! We should be getting our money’s worth! That means including persons with mental illness in programs for both their mental health conditions and their physical health problems.
For more information on mental health issues in this state, visit NAMI Tennessee at namitn.org, or for mental health issues in this country visit NAMI National at nami.org.
