Tiggernut's Bipolar and Mental Illness Information Page

Meet Tigger.
Tigger is a squirrel gray cat,
with classical hazelnut colored eyes,
he's hyperactive and not very bright, and generally a nut;
he's very affectionate,
and he's one of my two furry little best friends.

I am just moving into this site. My whole family suffer from depression and anxiety disorders, and my doctor and I now suspect that I may have the bipolar disorder that runs in my mother's mother's family. I had a rotten time with my health insurance coverage in Buffalo, NY, had a bad experience with one of its county clinics, too, and am now working on trying to get proper care in Austin Texas where I now live.

This site is in its infancy. I have pretty good sections of information on general information on mental illness (and its genetics) and on bipolar disorder, mostly links to the better web sites on the condition, a couple of good articles I added.

I want to do a good site on research on bipolar disorder - if I ever get time. Currently, some of Dr. Drevets' work on the neuroanatomy of the brain in depression and bipolar disorder is there, and that's most of what is there. There's alot more work than that on the neurobiology of depression and bipolar disorder!

I have a page of mental health resources for Austin, Texas - could save people some running around, most are to be found on the web somewhere but no comprehensive listing of them exists - anywhere. Except in some social workers' books at the local private mental health hospitals (St. David's Pavillion and Seton Shoal Creek Hospital. A third, Charter Behavioral Health Systems, is closing.) Missing only one thing - the local state mental health sytem - noone who isn't desperate, severely psychotic, and dying wants to find the department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. They do have quite a web site - though it reads as if a six-year-old wrote it and good luck following it.

Most importantly, I am compiling all of the info I can find on the subject of mental health parity as it relates to the Texas law and what TExas employers are doing. As a mental health consumer in need of viable mental health coverage so I can get needed mental health care, I am finding it impossibly difficult to learn what I need to about this law and also about what employers actually provide good mental health coverage. Texas' law requires full parity for "serious" and "biologically based" mental disorders, defined to include bipolar disorder of every kind and degree of severity. For everyone except private employers employing fewer than 50 people. Not surprisingly, anecdotal evidence suggests employers are ignoring and weasling around it one way and another. Except as concerns managed behavioral health care, the anecdotal evidence is nothing if not vague. An important way is interference from a federal law (ERISA) that is intended to assure that employers who are located in more than one state can offer uniform insurance policies of various sorts. One problem I am encountering in getting specific information is that it appears that after working very hard for the passage of the general law in 1997, the local and state offices of mental health advocacy organizations variously forgot about it, got involved in other things, and/or fell into disarray, in one important case, and had major manic episodes (one good thing about Austin's mental health advocacy organizations is that most people in them are highly functioning mental health consumers) - and people are claiming noone even knows if consumers are satisfied with how the law is working! Now, of all of that, I can forgive people who got sick.

As one would expect, I'm not the only one looking for the critical basic information I need to get the basic health insurance coverage without which all other developments in the entire field of mental health are for all practical purposes meaningless. Someone else went to Texas Mental Health Consumers a week after I did looking for the same info! I"ve spent nearly three weeks now not working at a day job, but trying to find the information I need in order to develop a job strategy and begin. Noone should have to go through this - so I'm putting what I find on a web site where others will be able to find it. Also, if it is true that the local and state level advocacy organizations in Austin aren't even knowledgeable about the law itself at this point let alone knowledgeable in any way about how it is or is not working, they can use this site as a resource.

Go to my pages on mental health parity

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contact me (Dora Smith) at tiggernut24@yahoo.com.

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