“Oh, I Forgot! It’s Chronic!”: Mental Health and Families by Former U.S. Congresswoman Marie Newman
As many families do, our family has had crisis days. Over the last decade, two of my loved ones have been in serious mental health crisis and it required immediate but then longer-term action as well. Both have happy endings. But happy endings, when it comes to mental health, do not always come for many. The patient must work hard, they must have quality care, and they must have strong support to address their condition in order to be successful.
One of those crises happened to our family as we were coming out of the COVID era in late 2022. On that day, it took me 8 full hours of calling dozens of locations and individual practitioners to get the help we needed. I was beside myself with worry. I finally found someone through a friend of a friend, and they offered to see us in the evening. If the crisis had been much worse, we likely would have had a much worse result. Luckily, we did not. I can share many stories but suffice to say all involve a shortage of providers, lack of coverage and lack of access.
NPR (12/23) reports the median wait time for an appointment is 67 days. In the same study that was reported on by NPR: “More than a third (36%) of the psychologists surveyed reported feeling burned out. While this is slightly less than the 2021 peak of 41%, the report notes that it is still a significant number of providers struggling to keep up with the demands of their work.”
My family members live with Depression and Anxiety every day and I have spoken about it frequently in public and privately. At least 30% of families in the U.S. are in the same boat. Yet, nowhere near 30% of the nation have access or can afford the mental healthcare they need.
The CDC indicates that in any given year in the last decade, 32-40% of adult Americans report struggling with ongoing Depression or Anxiety. 56% report they have needed help on occasion or because of a life event. Similarly, close to 10% of American children have been diagnosed with Anxiety or Depression each year in the last few years.
The reason I talk about this common family issue as much as I do is that it is a chronic illness and needs to be treated as such. If diagnosed and treated, these conditions can be managed, and quality of life can be maintained or elevated. However, when not diagnosed, not treated and/or not managed, things go awry quickly. Mental Health is very similar to Diabetes and Asthma. It is a chronic, common and manageable disease. While the stigma is changing for the better, we need to change faster. But the problem is much more than stigma, it is accessibility and affordability.
Not only is hard to find care, but it is frequently not covered by insurance and folks struggle desperately to afford it. Equally challenging, it is really hard to know where to start when a family member is diagnosed. There is nothing but questions at the beginning: Should I call a psychiatrist or a psychologist? Can my family doctor help? Do they need talk therapy? Do they need medication? Or both? How frequently? Do they need a day program or an in-resident center? Is it mild, moderate or serious? How do I keep track of all of the types of care, timing and contacts? How do I find therapists who will have a good rapport with my loved one?
And then, of course, there are times when you have smooth sailing for a long time and then, boom, there is a tough episode out of nowhere! In our family, when one of them has an episode, we tend to keep it light and hit our palms to our foreheads and say, “Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s Chronic!” Then, we jump into action.
Marie Newman is a former U.S. Congresswoman, CEO, nonprofit leader, marketing executive, 3x author, and mental health advocate.
As I have said many times to folks who ask me for advice about supporting family members with mental health or behavioral health issues, these guidelines help me:
If you have a general practitioner, you have seen or other care provider you trust, ask for recommendations or if they can provide a resource guide or a planning process for your loved one’s care, take it. Then use it – it will help you!
Keep an electronic folder (or printed) of contacts, timing, notes about what works and what does not work, medication and dosing, journal of your observations so you can help your loved one understand what therapies are most successful and why.
Sometimes your patience wears thin. Mine does. Know this will happen. When supporting a loved one, imagine them with a bandage on their head at all times, so you remember this is a chronic challenge and we don’t always understand what our loved on is going through with this invisible condition.
If you, as a supporter need a break, take a beat or a rest, you should and must make sure you stay healthy, so you can help in the future.
Seek out others who understand what you are going through and talk about the challenges with them, it will help, I assure you.
Patience and understanding will ebb and flow. Make sure you remember; you have work to be helpful and maintain quality of life. Work to cultivate patience and empathy. But also ask others to help too.
Free help is usually available through you county or state. It is there for you. Take the help. My family has been through a lot, but we are doing well. We are lucky. This is not true of many families with mental health challenges, and we need to change that in our country. Medical debt occurs frequently due to mental healthcare not being covered or high out of pocket costs. This prevents folks from gaining or maintaining treatment, which is why we have a mental health epidemic. We must address this.
For the record, Obamacare was a very good start, but we are not done and not as healthy as we could be for sure as a country. We need a full Healthcare For All approach.
What can be done:
Passing a Healthcare-for-All law that treats healthcare as a right. It must blend access and affordability for all, include a watchdog group, use corporations only as vendors (not as leaders of healthcare systems in the U.S or put them in charge in any way), and require the highest quality of care standards for all parts of healthcare. A Healthcare-for-All approach must create a system where we have enough care providers to provide care, when we need it and be concerned with our health, and with not making huge profits. We must end medical debt and then prevent it.
Stop supporting elected officials and candidates who take corporate PAC money, or we will never have Healthcare For All.
Speak loudly and frequently to your current elected officials about this issue. To be clear, 29 out of the top 30 countries have healthcare for all systems that work well. The U.S. is the only top country who does not. All are slightly different models with different features and have worked well. According to the United Nations study on national health systems done this year, we rank 17 th in the world for healthcare in 2024. We are the only country in this overall list where citizens must pay heavy out of pocket costs. We also keep slipping in quality of care. Now is the time to address this need, not later.
At the end of day, it is never a bad time to remind our elected officials that we can have a much better system, it just takes the will to do so. Oh, and yes, it does not needto be socialist or communist or whatever “ist” folks talk about. We are the greatest innovators on the planet, started acting like it. We can take the best of all ideas and build something that is ours, uniquely, as we have done many times before. There is a solution, and we can do it. Clearly, 70% of the US wants this type of solution. The trick here is to get our nation’s leaders to stop worrying about how much money they can get from healthcare corporate PACs and start focusing on having a healthy nation where everyone is cared for, always. Until then, be loud, tell your mental health stories and get the support you need.