Financial concerns about therapy costs

[Geena Amandus]

Hello,


I am new to this site, so I will not be surprised if this issue has come up before. Trauma, and PTSD, along with MDD, panic, and dissociative symptoms have often derailed my career paths. Concretely speaking, there have been times when I was near bottom of the USA financial pyramid. I was even without housing for a good part of a year. (An evil landlord did not help matters in kicking all tenants out of the building.)


Fortunately, my therapist kept me on a sliding scale. For a time I even had Medicaid. My concern is that any relapse with bad symptoms could put me out of work. I have some savings, but that would not be enough for the out of pocket medical costs I have.


I am wondering how other people survived and maintained treatments and medications, if they also found a sudden shift in careers, or long unemployment. Note that many years ago I worked with people with chronic psychotic disorders, or mania. They were usually given SSI or SSDI, and either lived in the worst parts of towns, or were in residential facilities, maybe better than homelessness, but still broke and often over medicated. (Looking back, I know that some of them were dealing with severe complex PTSD, and intrusive thoughts and severe dissociation was diagnosed as "psychosis.") Some people did some healing and moved on but it seemed most were trapped in the system. I can only hope and pray that our system of treatment changes.

 

[anthony]

I wouldn't rely on any system changing. You need to have a plan, simply. If you're working and are afraid that you may not be able to work in the future due to symptoms, then you take action that works for you, your life, your situation. Probably putting every red cent away for your future is ideal, even work a second job if needed to save more.

 

[Friday]

I am wondering how other people survived and maintained treatments and medications, if they also found a sudden shift in careers, or long unemployment.

I don't.

I've altered things to suit what I'm able to do.

Not as well as I could be. There is a huge potential for things I could be doing in my life that I'm simply not doing. Are there reasons for that? Sure. Some really good ones, & some total bullshit ones. Sorting out which is which? Not the easiest thing in the world to do. But that's also a thing to be working on, which is good.

How well I'm able to alter things to suit changing situations is pretty predicative of how well I'm going to be doing. For about 10 years, despite rapid & repeated change of circumstance I kept my head above water fairly easily. It wasn't something I did on purpose. It was just the most 'natural thing in the world' to substitute surfing with snowboarding, or to shift gears from paying for super expensive thing up front, to putting aside money each month to pay for it in a year (meanwhile doing this other free thing, that met the same needs). My stress & symptom management was exceptional... Looking back on it.

And then I spent about a year cutting away every safety net, quitting every copy mechanism, kicking out every single support I had in my life. Aaaaaand I crashed. Hard. I knew things were getting bad, again. But I didn't know how to stop it. So I ran around making shit worse, instead :rolleyes: I'm frustrated with myself now but I just didn't know how important some things were to keep in my life. In whatever form. So now I'm trying to add them back in. Possible? Totally. Just a lot harder.

So, very much agreed. Have a plan. Correction. Have several. Identify the key components in your life that keep you stable, and create backups, and alternatives, and ways to go about getting your needs met regardless of your actual situation.