By jb

Being crazy is not a cheap endeavor. In fact, it is such a complicated endeavor that my health insurance provider has a separate branch for psychological care. So complicated, so expensive that every visit has to be pre-approved.

And apparently, even things that have been pre-approved can be denied.

I am currently in a rough-and-tumble battle with my health insurance provider over my psych testing. You know, the psych testing that led to be being diagnosed with, and promptly treated for, bipolar II. The psych testing that helped me answer some important questions in my life, although it was no quick fix, and never any excuse. It just gave a start.

In any case, this is the psych testing that made my year so much more healthy, so much happier, so much better. The psych testing that helped me uncrack my mind, that helped me start to pull together the pieces.

I take my Lamictal like communion bread, knowing that something was broken in me, doing this in remembrance and preservation of my real self.

When I talk about the cost of crazy, I’m talking about the monetary cost, the thing that can be most easily fixed. Crazy can cost a lot more than that: I lost friends, sleep, grades, my own morals, and I almost lost the person that means most to me. All of those things were hard–and in some cases–impossible to regain. Those are the things that should hurt, that should be hard to get together, that should take a concerted effort on my part to put back together because they are worth that time, that effort.

But the actual payment of my fifteen hundred dollar testing psych bill? The one I got pre-approved? The one that is constantly being denied for a whole host of contrived reasons, from “billed from facility instead of provider” to “not approved for outpatient care”?

That should be the easy part. And yet, it’s the one that has proved, somehow, the most difficult.

Originally posted here.