Recent comments

Thank you, Wendell, for your courageous stand. That thanks isn't enough, though. We need to take the next step together, everyone who is outraged by the health insurance situation in this country. We need to do as the Civil Rights Movement did, take it to the lunch counters (insurance companies), to the courts, to the streets, if need be. Recission may violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on a de facto basis since it is practiced routinely against those with prior heatlh conditions and those people fall most heavily in protected groups, namely women of childbearing age and workers 48-64 years old. Purging may violate the HIPAA Act of 1996, because it results in insurers and health plans revealing illness information to employers for individuals, who eventually get fired for a trumped-up cause to lower the employer's premiums. There may be other violations as well; I am no attorney although I do have some familiarity with both of these pieces of legislation. What can be done to help?

I am 53 and I have been uninsured for 99.9 percent of my adult working life. I am self-employed as a legal transcriptionist. I wanted to echo this young man's difficulty with withdrawal from expensive prescription meds, especially psychotropics. I was refused the meds to withdraw safely from Paxil, which I was on for six years. It was a medication that I was unnecessarily on, as I was not suffering depression or anxiety, I simply had a difficult situation at home involving another family member, my son with Asperger's Syndrome who is also an alcoholic. There were many times during my withdrawal, which was in every way akin to this young man's, that I would have loved to have medical care but could not access care easily, and I wasn't able to drive for the first two years of withdrawal, although I did continue to work (I work at home), because I had no choice. I did call the clinic I had been going to and left a message for my doctor who had prescribed the Paxil. I called her twice in increasing agony and never got a call back. But I will also say that most doctors totally scoff at the idea of severe withdrawal from SSRIs, although it now widely documented, as well as the outright lies by companies like GSK that they knew of this all along. There is no guarantee in getting off SSRIs that you will not have a very rocky road, as can be attested to by many of the people on the support site PaxilProgress.org, a site that without the good people there I would have been dead, as I had no idea what was happening to me. I had never experienced suicidal thoughts at any time in my life prior to Paxil and it was terrifying, the urge was so strong. But this brings me to the point that as more people lose their jobs and their insurance they are, like me being forced, to cold turkey off these drugs and other psychotropics. It's a very, very dangerous situation. All of these drugs are highly unpredictable. I also wanted to put PaxilProgress on here because if you are going through difficulties with any type of psychotropic drug you will get support and kindness here. We have people here who are withdrawing from a number of these drugs. It's a site like no other I have seen on the web. There are many people, like me, who are, as I said, alive thanks to this site and the people that went through this hell before me.