Imagine

On September 18, the U.S. Senate passed the Mental Health Parity Act of 2007 (S 558), legislation requiring health plans to cover treatment for mental illness on the same terms and conditions as all other illnesses. The bill now moves to the House, where efforts are underway to move it forward later this fall.

The website for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, will help you send an automatic email (or letter) to your House representatives urging them to pass the bill. For those who are electorally challenged, you don't even have to know who your reps are -- they figure it out for you!! After you send the email or letter, the web site gives you the opportunity to send a notification email to 6 friends if you want.

The link where you can do this wonderful stuff is the NAMI Legislative Action Center, at http://capwiz.com/nami/home/.

It might be easy to think of those who would benefit from this legislation as just crazies, or hopeless types. Maybe some of them are -- but I think many would be "normal' people who suffer from depression or anxiety, or have other issues that could respond well to therapy. Imagine if people could actually afford treatment! Imagine if mental illnesses were thought of in the correct way -- as just illnesses that can be treated, and deserve to be covered by health plans -- the stigma might evaporate, and that would be a really wonderful thing.