Health Care – Yes! Mental Parity – No!

Dear Mr. President,

What has not been mentioned in the debates about mental health, because there are those who don't want it mentioned for fear that we will realize that the wool is being pulled over our eyes, is Mental Health Parity. MHP (ask your doctor if heavy drugs are right for you) is the mistaken belief that a medical doctor and a psychiatrist are the same, that a broken leg and a feeling of depression are equal.

The medical health world has tests and cures. You check this, you see that, you drink this bottle, you're cured. The mental health world has no tests; there are only hunches, best guesses and things that certain chosen ones agree should be what a certain thing should be called. The names change. Schizophrenia is not Bi-Polar, but not quite. There are invented names, RLS – Restless Leg Syndrome, PPD, Postpartum Depression – which, incidentally, can be handled hundreds of ways which involve no drugs. I could go on, but you are the President and your time is valuable.

Two outlandish lies become glaringly obvious if you look closely, which is why mentioning it in the debates is frowned upon. One is that the whole end product of the mental health industry is to sell drugs, not to heal the sick. The end game is profit, not wellness. Water is more effective than Prozac, with no side effects. Chocolate is a better treatment for depression than any drug on the market. The second lie is that anything gets cured. As there are no tests, there is no test for a patient being well. When a student goes crazy from his medication and shoots his classroom pals, the doctors say he needed more medication or different medication, or he went off his medication – meaning you should take it for the rest of your life. There are plans in place to screen every new mother, every student, and to put those who have a disorder on drugs. There's a defiant disorder, like when your teen doesn't want to clean her room – if you want to sell drugs, everything's a disorder. The Big Pharma companies want every man, woman and child, even your pet, on drugs for life – at seven times the cost of any other country.

Psychiatrists admit that there is no cure and no way to test for a cure, just as there is no way to test for the disorder. It's all opinion and “what do we have to do to sell drugs?” So to place “Mental Health” on an equal par with “Physical Health” is like comparing apples and albatrosses. The drug companies and those who make a fortune dispensing their poisons are hoping it will pass with parity because then they can insist that people see a shrink and take the drugs. It will then be law that they have to take the drugs, that the average person will have to pay for the psychiatric research to find new and more serious mental disorders for which they just found the “cure” in the form of a new pill – that you can get for only a small king's ransom.

In short, Health Plan? Yes! Mental Health Parity – No! Mental health, of which the great proliferation of drug ads on television is just a symptom, is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on this country. If you give it legitimacy, you also give a death sentence for the sanity of this country.

Jon Batson
Raleigh, NC