Insurance and Bi-polar illness:
Bi-polar is an illness much as heart disease and diabetics. The brain should not experience discrimination from the insurance companies. Parity should occur for treatment of diseases of all organs of the body.
Attitude of Mental Illness:
Individuals with mental illness receive reflection that the patient, or as called in mental illness circles as consumers, have a character flaw. Some individuals with mental illnesses would rather define their disease from disease side affect of drugs than the actual disease. It is safer to be with high blood pressure or diabetes, Once again the high and pancreas is not questionable organs. Why does the brain receive this discrimination? Can any organ of the body function alone without the brain?
History of Parity:
The bank buyout included a parity of mental health treatment, which helps states who attempted to bring parity to mental illness. Washington State has had parity for several years, but insurance companies could shop the states without parity for their home. Some insurance companies categorize mental illness treatment as nontraditional treatment such naturopathic or chiropractic services. Psychiatrics are medical doctors and use the traditional drug treatment as the most the main treatment protocol. Defining the parity provides the biggest challenge to advocates for consumers.
Treatment Challenge:
When a nation lack support to the consumer for mental illness and blames the consumer for the illness, a consumer may place unbearable stress on his family structure. Administration of consumer’s treatment plan may come from a drug nurse and maybe a once or twice a year visits with a psychiatrist. . Since the nature of brain problems may not be readily noticeable to the consumer, drug treatment needs supervision. Chemotherapy is highly supervised and mental illness treatment needs the same level of supervision. Some psychotropic drugs have life threatening or life modifying consequences if blood levels reach dangerous levels, but who supervises the drug consequences.
Since family members are forced, accept the role of supervisors of treatment and some consumers no longer have willing family members due to the stress. Privacy rules prevent medical staff from speaking to family members without permission from the patient even though they can legally give information to the medical staff.
Some communities lack emergency treatment for mental illnesses. Police sometimes are required to take the mentally ill into custody because there is nowhere to take them to protect them from harm. There have been incidents where the mentally ill have died in emergency rooms while they waited for treatment. Bipolar is one mental illness but can illustrate the problem seen by most mentally ill consumers to get treatment for the disease of their brain.