The Mentally Ill Are Left Behind....

My response in an on-going discussion about gun laws, Sandy Hook, and mentally ill individuals.
I liked it enough, and felt it touched a lot of what I was thinking today as I struggled with how to pay for medications that help keep me sane and how the outside world has NO concept of what it is to struggle with mental illness and the COST of psych treatment.

Now that I'm stable, I'm ready to dive back into this conversation.

Dealing with the costs of medicine and whatnot today really opened my eyes up to another side of the mental illness problem.
To put it bluntly, this shit is EXPENSIVE.
And not all are blessed to have insurance to help out.
And even those who do, still find the mental health services and medication to be expensive.

With so many of the state run mental hospitals closing, or becoming privately run (i.e. FOR PROFIT) institutions, the cost just keeps going up and up and up.

Take me for instance.
I'm bipolar n.o.s. (not otherwise specified -- meaning I have enough traits to BE bipolar, but I don't fit one of the standard molds).
My mania comes out not in super happiness, but in rage, destructive rage, and the feeling that I'm indestructible.
I was put on Seroquel XR and it was doing me a LOT of good. 
So we tried to fill a prescription for 90 days (what my insurance requires).  It was going to cost me $511.  I still needed to fill my prescription of Depakote (luckly just $65).
I had to call my doctor and tell him I couldn't afford the Seroquel XR and that it has no generic form.
Turns out there's Seroquel XR and then a just plain Seroquel.  That one has a generic form.  Which I picked up a 30 day supply for just $14.

I personally see the system failing the people who need it so desperately.
If I wasn't as stable as I am right now, when I got the phone call telling me it was going to cost me $511, I would have just not taken that medicine.  It would have sent me into a tail spin down into depression all over, and that could have been so bad.
And yet, there were alternatives that I wasn't told about.

I swear the doctors get incentives or kick-backs or "donations" from the Big Pharmaceuticals to push certain drugs.  Gotta get those "designer" drugs out there with the big flashy name (i.e. BIG price).  They don't want people knowing about the generic drugs, that might work just as well as the designer ones (maybe even better in some cases), because that would cut into their profits.

I personally would like to see well functioning social medicine like they have in Spain (I think that's where my old boss's friends were).  Taxes pay for it and everyone has equal access.  It's a pipedream, here in our capitalistic society, but a dream all the same.

Anyways, the point I was wanting to make through all of this is that the mom is having to choose.
Will she medicate and/or commit her one child, or will she put food on the table for the family?
THAT'S the real crime....that she has to choose between her children....which ones get the care.