I think it's wonderful that the British Royals - at least Diannah's boys - are going public with the fact that their mom's death affected them both emotionally. Gee how normal can you get. They even had moments of 'clinical depression' with all of the messiness that the 'disease' entails. Oh how brave they are to have risked being stigmatized as - I dunno uh normal'. Perish the thought.
First, I think that STIGMA is the most overused and misused word in both the English and American languages. When I think of 'Stigma', I think of walking down the sidewalk with my friend Joe, who early in the AIDS crisis, looked the part of someone about to die of AIDS. He had Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions on his face and arms and legs, and sadly, internally, and upon seeing him, people would go our of their way to cross a street to avoid being even near us. Or I think of when my 33 year old sister - a Harvard Graduate with honors, suffering from the wicked symptoms of her psychotic state and the disease of Paranoid Schizophrenia, being in a crowd and getting a message from her psychotic master to put an open mouthed, on the lips kiss on the next guy who passed by with a flannel shirt on, and doing so before I even knew that she had gotten yet another of her terrifying messages to go after another unsuspecting person. Thankfully, since my sister was Quite a looker, all of them forgave her when I said that awful line - 'My sister has been sick.' People tended to avoid being anywhere near her if given a chance to move away. I can't tell you how many times I heard the whispers that said things like 'Oh, she's that sick lady!' while one person was pulling another away from her path. THAT IS MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA. The Common symptom of Stigma is fear, and most often misguided, unjustified fear.
I have always and continue to admire all of the public advocacy taken on by the Princes and Wife in the areas of dealing with hunger, AIDS, and other important issues. While I recognize that this must have been quite a hurdle for them, the real problem in the US is that not only are the 'mentally ill' written off as un-helpable, they are un-helpable because we as a nation have decided that psychiatric diseases - despite the DSM IV classifications, are thought to be 'made up' or 'fake' in the eyes of the insurance industry and are not funded for treatment in the so-called healthcare system in the same way as 'real diseases'. The sad story is that many of the most debilitating of the psychiatric diseases are life-long issues that need constant attention, care, and frequently long term in-patient stays, which never actually cure anything.
So I ask - since the newest of the anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications are very costly, at least in the US, as are the new prices of older drugs and are way outside the budgets of many people of even not so low income, why bother seeking help. How much money do the insurance and pharmaceutical industries need to make? If Trump is such a 'cost cutter', why have the insurers and pharma companies not been Trumped?
The Princes can afford whatever they need, so I don't really see the huge risk or the applicability here unless they are willing to suggest that the profiteers in this situation need to be reeled in and once again, as it did briefly, the US should treat and fund treatment for mental disease in the same exact way as any other disease. Ditto the newer medications.
It's very sad that the Republican Controlled Houses of Congress were the ones that actually created the conflicted policy that is 'Obamacare', by voting to eliminate the things that lower income Americans desperately needed like the 'public option' or Medicare for anyone who was in need. The reality is that they so mangled the policy that by the end of the melee, the ACA looked like nothing more than a guarantee of 20+ million new subscribers for America's great unnecessary middlemen, the insurance companies. I'll tell you, it became an endurance test that had Obama and others just wanted to get something past congress, and what came out at least would ensure many many people who never had insurance before. I truly hope that those people remember how safe it felt to have insurance and a doctor just like 'normal' people when it is taken away by congress and Trump. The mid-term elections are very soon upon us, and hopefully the end of the heartless Republican control of congress will soon follow. I also hope that a movement starts in America to stop letting the insurance companies from dictating what Heathcare in America is and we all realize that its time to start implementation of a single payer option - as all providers and patients in need both want and support. Sure the insurance companies will once feel a little pain and have to change to keep up - but they will if they don't have any choice. Lobbyists have to be reigned in or the legislators who take from them are going to be watched and called out.Stigma, Healthcare and Dollars, oh my
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