Just cutting and pasting, people
In our ongoing debate about psych meds, Joe writes:
The paradox is that “medication management” may be the only “care” persons seeking outpatient services can access. It is the perfect storm – an underfunded, under-resourced mental health system attempting to cope with an ever increasing service population where complex human issues are addressed by medication alone. The situation is made worse when consumer expectations including expected outcomes are largely driven by false representations. Services are often claimed to be available on demand, comprehensive, culturally competent, effective, evidenced based and predicated on the principles of wellness and recovery. One merely need reach out for help and all will be provided, not.
Medication is simply a tool which is neither appropriate nor effective for everyone. (See both the CATIE and STAR*D studies.) Moreover, strict reliance on medication is antithetical to representations of consumer empowerment and consumer choice. There are too many personal issues and needs that can’t be medicated away. There has yet to be a medication that cures loneliness, provides a hug when one is sorely needed, houses the homeless, resolves family, workplace or social issues, raises self esteem, fosters a sense of self worth, and so forth.
[Image of a real vintage Thorazine ad from Deco Dog's Ephemera. In the first panel, the guy is in the hospital. In the second panel, he's so frickin' happy to be home on Thorazine, he's willing to hold yarn for the woman he lives with -- probably his mom.]
liz | 2:09 PM | Uncategorized
Without meaning to exonerate the “drug pushers” (and in full disclosure, I actually had a good friend at one point who was a pharma rep, albeit not for psychopharmalogical drugs), IMHO this is more an insurance industry problem than a Big Pharma problem.
In my experience, and those of other mental health consumers I know, insurance companies are overjoyed to pay for prescriptions — even those whose list cost (which, granted, the insurance companies don’t pay) is frighteningly high.
Yet they are penurious to a fault in refusing to pay for more than one therapy and psychiatry visit per month — if they pay for that.
Do the math. If more focused therapy and psychiatric monitoring, every two weeks instead of once a month, could help a consumer drop from, say, 5 or 6 medications to 2 or 3 (and let’s say one of the three dropped is the most expensive medication), THE INSURANCE COMPANY WOULD PROBABLY SAVE MONEY, or at worst break even. (It’s not like those infamous “usual and customary” rates for insurance companies don’t apply for doc visits as well as prescriptions.)
How self-defeating is that for the insurance company — let alone the consumer?!
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