How can insurance companies really expect people to recover with just a month or so of inpatient? People are given a glimpse of recovery, just barely about to alter their unhealthy patterns, and then poof, no more insurance coverage, time to leave, back to the life they had before treatment, back to the same region and routines that likely nursed the ed to begin with.
The whole system is FUBAR.
yes, they do that all the time. They don't care at all about us or what we need. They just don't want to lose any money. ED's are the most ignored problem there is, especially by insurance companies. They really don't care about mental health at all. It's really sad...I suffer from an ED myself...So i know what it's like.
shareLooking at it from a British perspective, I think it's very tragic. Possibly a sad reflection on the consumer society we're living in. Because, by only treating them for as long as the insurance money lasts, the treatment centres are more or less saying "We care about you as long as you're a paying customer and if you can't pay, you get better on your own".
We don't have the same healthcare set-up in this country that seems to exist in the States - you can get free treatment on the NHS, but of course America doesn't have a national health service.
And your post makes me think of something else, dogluver120. Because eating disorders are not predictable. You can't say someone will improve just because they spend three months at a treatment centre or because they have had 100 hours of counselling (to pick a random number). Some people with eating disorders may need the back-up of counselling etc for a long time afterwards and it seems very cruel that the insurance company can just turn round and say, "Right, that's it. You've used up all your insurance money" as though it's credit being used up on a mobile phone.
"If we go on like this, you're going to turn into an Alsatian again."
it's like an ice berg... the ED is at the surface of deeply rooted issues that require years of treatment.
this country is backwards. the system seems designed to abuse its citizens.
That is true. And also - I'm just picking a really random example here - let us imagine that a person developed an eating disorder as a result of being sexually abused. (I have read that this can sometimes be the case because eating disorders are often very much about control - a person being abused cannot control what is happening to them but may feel better if they can transfer those feelings of lack-of-control and control something else around them - one of the very simplest of these is how much food their body takes in.)
Now, for whatever reason, this theoretical person has developed an eating disorder. They might well feel guilt over the abuse or exposing the person who did it, even to a therapist, so it might take many, many counselling sessions for the therapist to even get the sufferer to admit what the problem is. Imagine that the medical insurance covered an amount of money that paid for twenty counselling sessions and the person with the eating disorder took until session number nineteen to finally reveal this secret - I don't know how any therapist could think it ethical to say, "Well, we've got one session left to sort out how you're going to deal with this and then you're on your own". It just seems wrong and yet it seemed to me that was effectively what this place was doing.
Yes, they might be getting the anorexic person to eat a full meal three times a day but - to pick my own major stressor, eating in public places like restaurants - how do they know that the anorexic person won't be taken out for a meal the following week and nearly have a nervous collapse over knowing they have to eat a meal in public in front of friends and family who probably think that - because they're out of the treatment place - they must be "cured"?
"If we go on like this, you're going to turn into an Alsatian again."
my friend is exactly that "theoretical" person you describe. in fact, a great majority of habitual inpatients have some form of physical abuse in their past.
on a happier note, you're from England, right? that's cool to be conversing with someone from there because i am planning on moving there for school. never visited yet. seems like people there are just more civil and polite than where i live (southern CA).
I certainly am - do you know whereabouts you're moving to? Is it high school (I believe in the states you go to high school till you're 18, whereas over here, we finish high school - some people call it secondary school, some go to grammar schools - at 16, then some go to college from 16 to 18 before university. Some people, obviously, don't go to college and go straight to work because you can at 16 here (after you finish school). Glad you think we're polite!
I did have a friend at sixth form who nearly drove me mad. She was 17 or so when she was self-harming - I don't think she had a good relationship with her parents - and she would show me the marks from where she had cut herself but make me promise not to tell any of the college staff. (In the end a friend and I did discuss it with a teacher - it got to the point where we more or less had to for our own sanity. In retrospect, especially given that it was the time of year - April/May - when everyone was preparing for exams, it was far too much to cope with, even for 17 year olds.)
I don't know exactly what was going on with her parents - she had a large family of siblings and didn't want to be responsible for splitting the family up, so I don't know what exactly that was supposed to imply. She wasn't anorexic, to the best of my knowledge, but she was a workaholic - if she was set an essay for homework that was meant to be 3 to 4 pages long, she would write one that was ten pages long, word-process it and add illustrations, that kind of person. Just total overkill and overreaction, but I got the impression that her parents expected her to do well in college and in exams because her elder siblings did, too. The teachers actually pondered over whether she could have an eating disorder - I don't think she did but I can see why her perfectionist streak made them think so.
Whatever relationship she had with her parents, I think it left her without the ability to deal with things head-on. She worked in a coffee shop at the weekends and in the holidays and said she was "practically running the place", although why she needed to take on that kind of responsibility in the run-up to going to university I have no idea. She would do things like arrange for us to go shopping on a Friday if the college term finished on Thursday, would tell me what time she would get off the bus near my house and then just not show up. (When questioned, she would always say she'd been called into work at the last minute but I noticed she never managed to pick up the phone to let me know.)
I suppose it just shows you, people deal with their stresses in different ways. I know it sounds selfish, but it got to the point with this friend where I had to break off contact with her because I got so fed up with her cancelling shopping trips etc. I think maybe she stood people up because she didn't want to deal with their reactions when she said she had to be somewhere else, and she ended up double-booking herself because she didn't want to or know how to say no.
Sorry, that was much longer than I expected it to be!
"If we go on like this, you're going to turn into an Alsatian again."
<They don't care at all about us or what we need.>
Dogluver, my impression is that US insurance companies don't care about anybody or anything but profit. I guess once you're out of danger of falling over dead within the next hour, that's good enough for them. Even though I found Brittany's behavior frustrating (not the outburst, but the lying) it was pretty clear that she was still in very bad shape upon her discharge. I was amazed to read her age was 15; I would have guessed something like 12, she was so frail and tiny.
And you're right, all kinds of behavioral health problems go untreated because people can't afford it. It takes an emergency, and even then, they don't give you much.
God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety
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