Patient versus Consumer

To add insult to injury, the DSM-IV classifies all serious mental illnesses as “disorders,” as if to suggest we have no more than some kind of head cold. No wonder your health plan and our public health system (such as it is) treats a disease of the heart with far more respect than a disease of the brain.

So while we act all politically correct, our people are dying. A million reported suicides (and many times that unreported) around the world each year, more than the number of individuals who die each year from AIDS. And many many times that from the medical complications of our illness (and of depression and schizophrenia and anxiety and other serious mental illnesses). Add to that the wrecked lives and distressed loved ones and lost productivity we are talking about the world’s number one public health problem.

I’ll repeat. The world’s number one public health problem. And we don’t even rate the respect of being called patients. Worse, we’ve been brain-washed into referring to ourselves as consumers. How sad is that?

Forgive me, but sometimes I get angry. Really really angry.

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If only I experienced the same kind of coincidence in playing the lottery. At the same time this blog went up, one of my favorite bloggers, Liz Spikol posted her own short blog on the very same issue. Liz suggests: “So what's the solution? Let's coin a new term right here, right now. Lines are open.”

I encourage readers to bookmark Liz’s “The Trouble with Spikol.”

Tell us your ideas about this issue in the message boards.