I have some very good news: The mental health parity bill passed Congress just a couple of hours ago, and it is predicted that President Bush will sign it into law!
This means that insurance companies are now forced to offer the same coverage and copays for mental health services as they do for physical health.
To quote Mental Health America:
Mental Health America today hailed as “a great civil rights victory” the approval of a mental health parity legislation that will broadly outlaw health insurance discrimination against Americans with mental health and substance-use conditions in employer-sponsored health plans.
The legislation, which recognizes the importance of mental health to overall health, bans employers and insurers from imposing stricter limits on coverage for mental health and substance-use conditions than those set for other health problems. It will provide parity for 82 million Americans covered by self-insured plans and another 31 million in plans that are subject to state regulation.
It is estimated that roughly 67 percent of adults and 80 percent of children requiring mental health services do not receive help, in large part because of discriminatory insurance practices.
For more information, see Mental Health America’s press release.
Murphy’s Law rides again!
If it can go wrong, it will!
Murphy, he of the Law, has been hard at work at Anxiety Central this week! It seems that everything that could go wrong did go wrong!
I was under the weather for several days, and I could not concentrate enough to write. “That’s OK,” I said to myself. “I’ve got enough research and work in progress to write several good posts this week.” How wrong I was!
My old reliable computer, the workhorse that I’ve bragged about in the FAQ, has decided to start crashing unpredictably several times a day. The database that I keep my research in and where I do all my writing has become corrupted twice this week, forcing a rebuild that takes six hours each time. Checking the boot drive for errors takes another hour. To make matters worse, programs that used to stay open for days keep quitting unexpectedly every few minutes, making life very frustrating. This program quit once while I was writing this post, and my browser quit while I was posting it!
It reminds me of Flagle’s Law of the Perversity of Inanimate Objects:
Any inanimate object may be expected at any time to behave in a manner that is entirely unexpected and totally unpredictable for reasons which are completely unknown or thoroughly obscure.
As a result, I have lost three days worth of work, both research and writing, along with the time it took to fix things. Even though I back up daily, Murphy’s Law says that the crashes will happen right before the appointed time for the backup.
The bottom line of this tale of woe: That’s the reason that there’s been only one other post this week, where I usually post four.
The hippies had it right
Incense: ancient antidepressant
Burning incense, it turns out, can alleviate Anxiety or depression. So says a new study from Johns Hopkins University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The frankincense incense activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain and causes antidepressant-like behavior. This suggests an entirely new class of depression and Anxiety drugs that, literally, might be right under our noses! Gerald Weissman, editor of the journal in which the study was published, says,
This study … provides a biological explanation for millennia-old spiritual practices that have persisted across time, distance, culture, language, and religion — burning incense really does make you feel warm and tingly all over.
Read more about the study in Science Daily.
Have a great weekend!
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