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Wake up call: Mental Health Awareness
Aug. 11th, 2014 09:25 pmRobin Williams has died. It was suicide stemmed by depression.
As horrible as this is, it needs to be a wake up call to health care providers. In Canada, mental illness is not covered by health insurance. Need therapy? Need medication for your disorder? Yer on your own. OHIP will not cover you. This needs to change. Mental illness is far from being "cured" or even properly pinpointed, but we know enough about chemical balances in the brain to know that disorders like Depression, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar disorder are not psychosomatic, or merely a state of mind. And if people need medication or therapy to get reprieve from such demons, such help needs to be within their reach.
The human mind is so diverse and so complex, that it's very difficult to tell how much therapy or medication or what combination of both is needed to truly fix the problem. But making mental health care more available to people who desperately need it is a good starting point.
As horrible as this is, it needs to be a wake up call to health care providers. In Canada, mental illness is not covered by health insurance. Need therapy? Need medication for your disorder? Yer on your own. OHIP will not cover you. This needs to change. Mental illness is far from being "cured" or even properly pinpointed, but we know enough about chemical balances in the brain to know that disorders like Depression, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar disorder are not psychosomatic, or merely a state of mind. And if people need medication or therapy to get reprieve from such demons, such help needs to be within their reach.
The human mind is so diverse and so complex, that it's very difficult to tell how much therapy or medication or what combination of both is needed to truly fix the problem. But making mental health care more available to people who desperately need it is a good starting point.
