Access Denied: The Cost of Mental Health

I didn’t fall through the cracks—I was pushed.

We don’t talk about it enough, but healing—real, sustained, consistent mental health healing—is a luxury.
Not just because society treats it that way, but because for millions of people, it actually is.

Mental health care isn’t just framed as a luxury. It’s financially, logistically, and culturally inaccessible for far too many people. And in a country that demands productivity above all else, there’s little room to fall apart—let alone heal.

Therapy is expensive. Medications come with price tags and long pharmacy lines. Mental health days are only granted if your job even believes in them. Most people can’t take weeks off to rest, can’t afford to spend hundreds a month on a therapist, can’t drop everything and “go heal” when they’re barely keeping the lights on.

So when people say “just go to therapy” or “focus on self-care,” it often lands like a slap—not because the advice is wrong, but because it’s painfully out of reach.
What if you don’t have insurance?
What if your job doesn’t give you time off?
What if you’re raising kids, working nights, caring for someone else, barely making it through the day?

Over 50% of U.S. adults with mental illness receive no treatment at all. That’s tens of millions of people walking through the world carrying pain without help. And when you zoom in, the numbers reveal the deeper injustices:

• Only 39% of Black adults with mental illness receive care.
  
  

• Many Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American communities face cultural stigma, language barriers, and a shortage of trusted providers.
  
  

• LGBTQ+ individuals, especially trans people, are more likely to experience trauma and mental illness—and more likely to be mistreated or turned away when they seek care.
  
  

• And for the uninsured? The average therapy session runs between $200–$400 per hour, often entirely out of pocket.
  
  

I know this firsthand.
I spent years without insurance, cycling through low-income mental health clinics where I saw a new provider every two weeks. Each one had a different theory, a different diagnosis, a different drug to throw at me. There was no stability, no trust, and absolutely no long-term care.

What I did have was side effects. Withdrawal. Mania. Insomnia. Nausea. I was constantly cycling between starting and stopping medications, like I was living in the in-between of two bad options: untreated suffering or chemically-induced chaos. Every adjustment wrecked my body, and no one was around long enough to notice—or care.

I wasn’t just fighting my mind. I was fighting the system that claimed it was trying to help.

During that time, I developed temporary Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and hyperthyroidism that eventually had to be treated with surgery. My hair fell out. My bipolar and CPTSD went ignored. I stayed up scrubbing the kitchen floor with a toothbrush at 3AM because I was hallucinating spots on the tiles. I had zero impulse control. I was hallucinating. I was actively suicidal, and still being told to wait six weeks for a follow-up.

And the damage wasn’t just temporary.

I had a Transient Ischemic Attack—a mini stroke—that left me with long-term memory loss and speech processing issues. I developed gastroparalysis, which means my stomach literally doesn’t process food properly. My liver was damaged—and years later, I’m still in treatment for it.

That was a decade ago. And to this day, I wonder:
Would it have been better to just raw-dog life than to go through that?
Because healing shouldn’t break you more than the illness does.

Things only improved when I got on real insurance and finally had access to stable care—to doctors who didn’t rotate out every few weeks, who actually listened, who didn’t treat me like a liability. It’s not perfect. It’s still hard. But it’s something. It’s a version of help that doesn’t feel like harm. And that shouldn’t be a rare story. That should be the baseline.

Because the consequences of neglect don’t just disappear. They show up in quiet, invisible ways:
The parent who snaps under pressure.
The worker who stops showing up.
The friend who becomes distant.
The teenager who stops speaking.

They show up in burnout, addiction, chronic illness, disconnection, and suicide.
They show up in statistics.
They show up in funerals.

Mental illness doesn’t wait until it’s convenient. It doesn’t care about your shift schedule or your rent due date. It doesn’t say, “Oh, you’re busy? I’ll come back later.”
And yet, our entire system assumes that healing is something you can just pencil in—if you’re lucky, if you’re privileged, if you can “afford” to fall apart.

This is why the quote “Self-care is not a luxury; it’s a necessity” matters more than ever.
Because healing isn’t a lifestyle trend—it’s a basic human need.
And as Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation.”

Healing doesn’t just mean treating a diagnosis. It means being allowed to rest without shame. It means access to safe, affordable care, being believed when you say you’re not okay, and not having to choose between a therapy session and groceries.

Most importantly, healing should never be gatekept by income, identity, or circumstance. We need policies that fund care, workplaces that respect it, and communities that make space for it. We need to stop treating mental health like a reward for surviving and start treating it like the foundation for living.

So if you’re someone doing your best to hold it together—without a therapist, without time, without money—I see you.
You are not broken.
You are navigating a broken system.
And if healing feels like something you haven’t “earned” yet, let me say this clearly:
You don’t have to earn it. You just deserve it.

Mental health care isn’t a luxury.
It’s a right.
And until the world treats it like one, we fight for the people who’ve been told they’re too poor, too complicated, too “dramatic,” or too late to help.

Because everyone deserves to heal

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