"Mental" Health Parity

I understand from what I am reading in the news that somehow or another the bank bailout legislation now going through Congress will somehow incorporate requirements that "mental health" conditions be reimbursable on a par with "physical" diseases. This requirement of "mental health parity" has been sought for ages, because health insurance companies have stubbornly refused to grant reimbursement for psychologists and psychiatrists (as well as other mental health treatment providers) who provide psychotherapy for most psychiatric disorders, most of the time. I have yet to engage in any celebration about this, because I suspect that the insurance companies will find (as usual) ways to get around it... but I am cautiously hopeful.

Why is it that this sort of "act of Congress" is so long overdue, and why is it even necessary?

We still, in many ways, operate under the persistent but simplistic delusion that "mental" problems are different in kind than those problems that are obviously based (or manifested) in our bodily functions. Mind-body dualism, long understood to be a serious distortion of reality, survives in many ways within (yes) our minds, and in the cultural expressions of our minds (e.g., insurance companies!).

Yet the distinctions that our minds, and our insurance companies, create are specious, insubstantial, and are belied daily by the very science that our minds engage in. A common but intangible phenomenon known as "stress" provides an excellent illustration of the inextricable web that is our mind/body/brain. When the human organism is subjected to conditions ("stressors") that are frightening, a predictable cascade of biological phenomena ensue. This is adaptive and necessary, but it can easily get out of hand when the stressors are chronic, extreme, often repeated, and/or when we re-create the stressors within our own minds (in our memories). When that happens, our minds/bodies/brains display not only "mental" symptoms (anxiety, depression) but "physical" symptoms, as well (including heart disease, cancer, and many other disorders).

A recent news item from Science Daily, about stress-related disease in police work, includes this:

The pressures of law enforcement put officers at risk for high blood pressure, insomnia, increased levels of destructive stress hormones [cortisol], heart problems, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide, University at Buffalo researchers have found through a decade of studies of police officers... "When cortisol becomes dysregulated due to chronic stress, it opens a person to disease," said Violanti. "The body becomes physiologically unbalanced, organs are attacked, and the immune system is compromised as well. It's unfortunate, but that's what stress does to us."

Stress reduction programs, anyone? Check out Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (and meditation, in general) as a way to bring mind and body back from a state of internal war and chaos, into a more peaceable and integrated state. Bringing peace, integration, and wholeness to individual organisms (human beings) might very well bring a larger peace, as well, to all beings.