knowledge at your tips
When 19-year-old Marcus Bell first walked into a therapy office in Austin, Texas, he had already been turned away by two providers. The first told him he needed to “wait until he was older to be sure.” The second insisted on a 12-month exploratory phase before discussing a referral letter for hormone therapy, even though … Read more
Marcus had been driving for Uber and DoorDash in Phoenix for almost three years when the panic attacks started. He was making decent money, around $52,000 a year, but he had no health insurance because he assumed contractors couldn’t afford it. After his third trip to the emergency room in two months, an ER social … Read more
Maya, a 31-year-old graphic designer in Asheville, North Carolina, started noticing the dread before her phone even buzzed. Her best friend Tasha had been calling nightly for months, sometimes for two hours, processing a chaotic breakup, a job she hated, and a complicated relationship with her mother. Maya loved her. She wanted to help. But … Read more
Tasha noticed the changes slowly at first. Her mother Evelyn, 78, living alone in Charlotte, had always managed her own affairs, but in the span of about eighteen months she’d missed three Medicare Advantage open enrollment windows, let her supplemental coverage lapse, accumulated $4,200 in unpaid prescription copays, and started telling Tasha that “the people … Read more
When Mei-Lin Chen, a 34-year-old software engineer in Sunnyvale, California, finally decided to seek therapy after months of insomnia and silent crying spells in her car, she expected the hardest part to be admitting she needed help. It turned out the harder part was finding someone who could understand her. The first English-speaking therapist asked … Read more
Diane in Atlanta opened the envelope and stopped breathing for a moment. The bill was for $147,300. Her son Caleb had spent 28 days in residential treatment for opioid use disorder, and even though insurance had covered most of the inpatient psychiatric stabilization, the residential program turned out to be largely out-of-network. The total billed … Read more
Eleanor, a 42-year-old high school teacher in Portland, Oregon, had spent two years repeating “I am worthy of love” in front of her bathroom mirror every morning before learning that the practice was making her feel worse. Her therapist, a soft-spoken cognitive behavioral specialist, gently asked one Tuesday whether the affirmation actually felt true when … Read more
Robert, a 61-year-old retired electrician in Cleveland, walked into the emergency department with crushing chest pain, a troponin level off the chart, and a clear command from his cardiologist that he needed immediate cardiac catheterization to prevent a fatal infarction. He refused. Not in a confused, mumbling way, but firmly, with eye contact, telling the … Read more
Eleanor Briggs, 78, had lived in her Sarasota condo for forty years before her daughter Marcy noticed the changes. The repeated phone calls. The forgotten stove burner. Then the agitation that turned into screaming at invisible visitors at 3 a.m. After a hospitalization for a UTI revealed advanced dementia complicated by psychotic features, Eleanor’s geriatrician … Read more
Renee from Cleveland was three weeks into her psychiatric inpatient stay when she got the first bill in the mail: $87,400 from the hospital, $12,200 from the attending psychiatrist, and another $4,800 from the lab. Her insurance had paid most of it, but her share alone was $14,600 after the out-of-pocket maximum, and she’d already … Read more