Our healthcare doesn’t need to be locked in battles over definitions & costs with sociopathic bureaucracies fixated on loss & profit
Top world athletes from Naomi Osaka, a professional tennis player from Japan, to Simone Biles, perhaps the leading Olympic gymnast of all time, to a group of 20 to 22 male athletes of all kinds from different nations, have compelled the rest of Humanity to pay attention to mental health issues. Different labels persist: mental health, emotional health, neurological health, and psychological and psychiatric health. Perhaps the most accurate is neuropsychological diseases and injuries, but such is too much of an awkward mouthful to speak. “Mental” is short, two syllables, and rhymes with “dental.” Thus such wording becomes part of the problem. We humans live in an ocean of language as fish swim in water and birds fly in air. We don’t always see our “water.” We don’t always see each other.
Many have speculated upon a chicken and egg type of question: which came first, the mind or the body? Did mind arise from body, i.e. matter, or did the world pour forth from the mind? It’s an inquiry dividing both scientists and mystics from the beginning of human time.
Truth is they are one and the same, body and mind are. We must grow up as a species to acknowledge such and reevaluate our healthcare systems, including the financing of our healthcare. It’s long overdue.
Healthcare needs to be simply healthcare. Dental health, orthodontic health, naturopathic health, alternative health, preventative and complimentary health, health education and practice, and so-called mental and emotional health must be integrated into one unified system. No, do not list these as bullet points side by side with regular medical healthcare, but as one unit, healthcare. A more important debate is simply should “healthcare” be spelled as one word or as two, as in “health care?” But our species and our institutions are not there yet. We’re still stuck in unnecessary, fiddlefrak ridiculousness with a malicious, sociopathic system robotically focused not on the compassion-based wellbeing of human beings but how bloody much does it cost to heal a sick and/or injured person.
Not to mention one’s spiritual health, financial health, and community health. Yes? Please don’t tell me I’m the only one who’s thought of the reality of the whole?
I do not have solutions, only suggestions. They begin, however, with a request, no, a demand, a demand we humans get our act together in this arena and view mental health as much a part of healthcare as so-called physical health. Because, unlike the grotesque errors of the otherwise brilliant René Descartes on his Cartesian misunderstandings, mind and body are one. Especially in the reality of the life we live today. Let’s evolve and transform our healthcare system.
As Ms. Osaka has declared, “It’s O.K. not to be O.K.” Our species would be wise to understand and acknowledge the depth of her wisdom and that of Simon Biles and numerous other gifted people daring to come forth to take their stands amidst a deluge of public ridicule, ignorance, and vindictiveness. Let love, empathy, and generosity guide us in establishing new standards of caring for each other. Health is health.
William Dudley Bass
Saturday 31 July 2021
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol
Copyright © 2021 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.