...at least, it does if you're poor.
If you lose your job (and health insurance) and on you're on the brink of homelessness and become depressed and feel like killing yourself, then expect to be even MORE stressed and even MORE enraged and frustrated for just being poor and seeking mental help for your stress and suicidal tendencies. Just the act of attempting to seek FREE help can put one over the edge.
I've come to the conclusion that if you're seeking FREE mental help, it would be much easier if you stood on a sidewalk drooling and threw rocks at people until someone calls the police on you. Then they can lock you up like a criminal, treat you like dirt, and make you suffer more until someone at the police station suggests you might need mental help, and assigns a shrink for you.
If you don't want to go to jail, but don't want to die by your own hand, and you want to make an appointment to seek FREE mental help for stress, be very prepared to endure long lines, tons of paperwork, multiple trips to places far from home, and making numerous phone calls to recorded messages, pushing numbers (hoping to get a REAL person), and then being put on hold for an hour.
Then after all that, you finally get a temporary medical card from the county...then you do it all over again in an attempt get an appointment with a shrink and maybe, get some treatment.
Then after going through all that (again) while trying to make an appointment, When you first call, a recording comes on telling you that if it's an emergency, to call 911 (as if nobody has ever heard of that before. A five-year-old knows this).
Then when a real live person finally comes on the phone you're told that you can't make an appointment, that you just have to show up before 8 in the morning (and to be there early). Then what? Wait in line all day long again, filling out more paperwork, and hope that maybe you can get an appointment in the next month or two. By that time, you will have thought suicide wasn't such a bad idea after all...you wouldn't have been put through a maze like a rat and treated like scum for being poor and not having insurance.
They asked me, "Do you have insurance?" I said no, and they said I couldn't make an appointment, that I had to just show up at their office (as in first come, first served). So I asked them, "If I had insurance, could I then make an appointment?" They said "No, we wouldn't even take you." (I suppose they only specialize in low-life scum.)
So why the f*ck did they ask me if I had insurance? Do "normal" mentally ill people WITH insurance get referred to better shrinks? "Hello? 911? I'd like to report my disgust with the American healthcare system."
If you have stress, seeking FREE help for stress will only make you more stressful. Maybe it would have been better to just go to a convenience store and panhandle enough money to buy a 6-pack of beer. Either that, or just shoot myself in the head and finally be done with it.
Rich people can just snap their fingers and have a personal assistant call their shrink and make an appointment the same day, and get any medication they want to sooth their frayed little nerves. Rich people get REAL healthcare, poor people get tortured first before they can even qualify for just the very basic attention.
Is this the "government healthcare" (ObamaCare®) that the Republicans and Glenn Beck have been fighting so hard to repeal and deprive me of? Or maybe they just preferred that I used the bullet instead.
All my life (55 years) I never realized how badly this country treats its poor until I became poor myself. The Republicans had me thoroughly convinced that they all drove Cadillacs and hung out by the pool. That all those poor people were just kicking back and enjoying their government hand-outs and laughing at me. But it's not that way at all. If this is the very best our government can do, then I'd be very afraid of seeking "FREE" medical help in a foreign country. This country is sucking more and more every day.
Now I understand why all those people freaked out and went postal. It wasn't JUST because they lost their jobs, their homes, their life's savings, their cars, and their spouses and/children that freaked them out. It was trying to seek FREE help from a doctor that not only doesn't give a damn about you, but is not shy in letting you know.
Who's got an AK-47? And where's the f*cking post office?!?!?
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