Daniel Reyes 
Marisol Tavares had been on Xanax for eleven years when her primary care doctor in Tucson retired in March. The new physician told her the prescription was “inappropriate long-term” and cut her dose in half on a Tuesday afternoon. By Friday, Marisol was in the emergency room at Banner University Medical Center with a tonic-clonic … Read more
By the time Priya Anand walked into a Boston ERISA attorney’s office in October 2024 to ask whether she could sue insurance mental health denial claims through the federal court next door, she was carrying a banker’s box. Inside it were four denial letters from her self-funded Aetna plan, two appeal responses, three peer-to-peer review … Read more
Eric was 38 when his wife found him in the garage at 2 a.m. taking apart a lawn mower he had no plan to fix. He had not slept more than four hours in a week. He had been picking fights with his crew at the construction site. He had told nobody he was thinking … Read more
Sergeant First Class Marcus Eriksen completed his fourth deployment in 2017 and spent the next six years quietly disintegrating in a rental house outside Fayetteville, North Carolina. He started drinking after the third deployment and never really stopped. He startled at fireworks, at car doors, at his daughter dropping a plate. He could not sit … Read more
Damon, a 41-year-old high school teacher in Rochester, New York, switched to his wife’s Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO during open enrollment after his district moved away from a UFT plan. He had been seeing the same therapist for OCD-related contamination concerns for three years. The therapist was in-network with Anthem, the directory said … Read more
Mental Health Parity Is the Law That Most Patients Do Not Know They Have Federal law has required most health plans to cover mental health care at the same level as medical care since the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act passed in 2008. The law was strengthened by the Affordable Care Act, which extended parity … Read more
Priya from Boston walked into a heated power yoga studio in Cambridge eight months after the assault, hoping the class would help her sleep. The teacher, well-meaning and certified through a 200-hour program that had spent maybe ninety minutes on trauma, walked the room with bare feet and a strong adjusting hand. He pressed her … Read more
Mindfulness as a Mental Health Tool, Not a Lifestyle Trend The cultural visibility of mindfulness and meditation has grown so much in recent years that the techniques are now associated more with corporate wellness programs and Instagram influencers than with their actual evidence base. The truth underneath the cultural noise is that mindfulness, when practised … Read more
Jared Vasquez, twenty-eight, an Army veteran living in Colorado Springs, took a fall from a second-story balcony at a friend’s wedding in late September. He was knocked unconscious for maybe ninety seconds. The ER did a CT scan, told him it was a concussion, gave him a one-page printout about rest, and sent him home. … Read more
Hannah Whitaker was 33, a homeschooling mother of four in Greenville, South Carolina, and her family had been members of Christian Healthcare Ministries for seven years. They paid their monthly share, attended church every Sunday, and felt grateful for the community that had helped pay for her second daughter’s tonsillectomy without a single billing fight. … Read more