Being PH Neutral

[from 7/7/10]

We here at Real Change are nothing if not organized. Organization is our middle name. That’s right: “Real Organization Change” is what our Mama calls us when she’s mad at us. “Get in here right this minute, Real Organization Change!” she says.

So I have to go to meetings to find out what I need to know in order that all of the others organize me. This is why I know that this rag is going to print something or other about mental health parity, or “MH parity.” If it isn’t in this very issue here, it will be in the next one, or the next one. I learned that at a meeting.

Mental health parity is a very important parity. Mental health parity is the parity you get when you make mental health care more like its big brother, physical heath care. Since we will read all about that in a legitimate article here, I would like to use this illegitimate space to discuss what physical health (PH) parity would look like.

We will have PH parity when physical health care is brought in line with the standards of mental health care. Note the ironic humor: I said “standards”, ha!

The most important thing we need to do is get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and Eli Lilly to come up with more pills for us to buy from them. With PH parity, you will mostly get pills to help keep you from “acting out” your ailment. So say you lose your favorite thumb in the shredder at work. They could put you on a pill to stop your complaining about it, so you can return to being functional right away.

The pills will cost $10 each and have to be taken daily for the rest of your life, so getting you functional enough to make that kind of swag for the drug company will be essential to keeping our PH system operating smoothly.

Your anti-complaint meds will also make you impotent, overweight, joyless, and boring at parties, so you’ll have no reason not to throw yourself into two full time jobs to keep paying back your drug company for its worthy investments in research.

PH parity means that if you “present” one broken leg to your health care provider, he/she would put them both in a cast, for fear you’d break the other one.

PH parity means whatever is wrong with you will get you referred to a social worker, who will empathize with you and help you address your issues.

Let’s say you have an issue with lying on the floor convulsing in pain, The social worker won’t know anything about people presenting that issue, because social work schools will only teach what to do for headaches and gonorrhea. So you’ll be counseled in safe sex practices, given condoms, an aspirin, and a pamphlet, made to list all your partners, and sent down the hall for a penicillin shot.

Have you ever noticed how some people, when they find out someone is blind, speak louder and slower to them? That’s what mental health care is all about, treating every kind of symptom as indicating one kind of disorder, namely “mentally ill.” If we had physical health parity, people with cancer would be treated as if they had rabies. They’d all be the same. They’d be the physically ill.

Instead of hospitals, there’d be institutions for the severely physically ill. You wouldn’t get treatment there, but you wouldn’t notice, because you wouldn’t have got treatment anywhere else either.

In jail, if you told your jailers you were physically ill, they’d put you in your own private cell and take away your belt. But you still wouldn’t be allowed to have your medicine.

If we had PH parity, Cheney would never had been vice president. In fact, after his very first heart attack, back in the Middle Ages, they’d probably have given him a prefrontal cardiotomy and a nice room with a view of four walls.