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Mental health care is one of the biggest unmet needs of our time. Nearly one in two people in the U.S. will suffer from depression, anxiety disorders or another mental health ailment at some point in their life, and about one in 17 Americans currently has a serious mental illness. Young people are especially prone to these troubles. Yet millions of people living with these conditions do not receive the care they require. In recent years the health system and state and federal governments have taken steps to right that wrong. Progress has been slow, and budget cuts and legal wrangling have now put many of these measures at risk. Doctors, insurers and politicians need to pick up the pace.
Mental illness strikes without regard for economic class, but the strain is acute for people with low incomes. About one in six adults living at just above the poverty line or lower has severe mental health problems. Without access to affordable treatment, many have a hard time holding down a job yet do not qualify as formally disabled, thus leaving them locked out from insurance coverage. A recent large study in California found that only 32 percent of uninsured residents with mental illnesses received any treatment at all and that less than 12 percent got adequate help.
The human and economic toll is enormous yet often hidden. Untreated mental illnesses in the U.S. cost more than $100 billion a year in lost productivity, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Local hospitals and clinics must cope with associated chronic physical diseases. Schools have to open more special education classes. Courts and jails handle a large number of individuals who suffer from untreated mental illnesses. Suicide ranks among the top 15 most common killers in the U.S. (in the top three among young people), and 90 percent of cases can be attributed to mental illness.
The severity of the problem has prodded politicians into action. By 2002, 29 states had mandated that health insurance packages cover mental illness on the same terms as physical illness, and in those states the suicide rate fell by an average of 5 percent. But equalizing coverage means little to those who lack insurance altogether, and states are increasingly failing to make provision for them. In the past three years states have cut up to 39 percent of their mental health budgets, according to NAMI.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010, should help fill these holes. It requires that insurance plans offer “behavioral health” coverage, including mental health and addiction and substance abuse help, as an “essential health benefit.” At least 3.7 million Americans who are currently living with severe mental illness will get new benefits for their conditions by 2014, either through extended Medicaid coverage or insurance exchanges.
Yet these measures are in legal jeopardy. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against the constitutionality of the act late in March. If the court rules that states do not have to expand their Medicaid programs, as the act currently requires, it could shut out 16 million Americans who would otherwise receive Medicaid coverage for mental health. A ruling that closes the state insurance exchanges would deprive another 16 million. Scuttling the law would also do away with plans to build national centers for the treatment of depression and to improve the way behavioral health services are integrated into standard care.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBoth this article and NAMI ignore the legal treatment of people with mental illness, which is a huge factor in the willingness of people with mental illnesses even to seek help. May State have mental health codes like Oklahoma's, where a person with mental illness may be involuntarily committed for "having placed another person or persons in reasonable fear of violent behavior directed towards such person or persons or serious physical harm to them as manifested by serious and immediate threat". Police often do not bother to investigate the claims of people with mental illnesses, which prosecutors in turn do not believe and courts will not hear. Bigots are their own proof.
This allows any bigot or other malicious person to make a mere claim of “reasonable fear” to get a person with mental illness arrested and taken to the local loony bin. Where the “mental health professionals” who work there, and will benefit from the commitment, can function as the sole witnesses, mental health evaluators and petitioners for commitment, as well as the treating “counselors” and doctors. They and the Mental Health Court may even claim that there are no doctors or psychiatrists of long-standing to enter into consideration of commitment. Once the “experts” have reached their conclusions, unsworn hearsay becomes revealed truth, which the Mental Health Court will accept without question, and committed inmate must, in order to be released from indefinite confinement, acknowledge the hearsay to prove that he or she will not be a danger to anyone.
Where a felon is convicted on average for only about one out of ten crimes, under the standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”, a person with mental illness can be incarcerated and deprived permanently of civil liberties (even after release) on the lesser standard of “clear and convincing evidence”. And by the opinions of “experts” who cannot predict violent behavior in more than about one out of three cases. See “The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior” by John Monahan, circa 1980. In practice, the local District Attorney and Mental Health Court may not even abide by clear and convincing evidence, accepting uninvestigated, unsworn hearsay as proof under the unconstitutional standard of “a predominance of the evidence”. The person’s public defender may not even bother to explain his or her constitutional rights, or defend them in court. NAMI does not concern itself with legal justice for people with mental illness, only with making commitment more available for "help".
Read as "Many States" instead of May State.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead as "person's public defender".
And I would have changed the spelling to skeptic66, to avoid looking like a dunce, but this site does not seem to offer a way.
Working with children, teens, and adults every day as a community mental health therapist, I am struck by the magnitude of the problem of poor parenting in the early environments of clients who later show symptoms of depression, anxiety, attention deficit, personality disorder, and the whole host of other neurotic, maladaptive behaviors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my agency and many others across the country there has been an increased focus on parent education, child attachment bonding and development in recent years. Parents who have suffered physical, emotional or sexual abuse and/or neglect in their own childhood, show the characteristic signs of depression, anxiety, attention and focus issues, and risky addictions that cause dissociation and unpredictable behaviors that can terrorize children or cause neglect, which perpetuates the cycle.
There is something about the need to engage in excessive work, and the addictive nature of our recreational play that seems to lead to a break-down in the family structures needed to adequately focus on and prepare children for adulthood, and this, I think, apart from any focus on medical/organic models should be a primary focus of research in mental health.
greg9720 is right. But sometimes it's worse than that. Some parents pass on the abuse because that's the way they were treated, and they hold it up as a standard of righteousness. Some buy into it as a survival strategy - be the bully's supporter and someone else takes the heat. Or to put it another way, sometimes racism is just white people treating black people the same way they treat their own kids. You want to stop violence? Stop child abuse. Good parenting should be agreed upon by society and taught in schools, not left until someone needs counseling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a noble article, but the reality of our mental health needs is daunting. In 1960, the patient population of Central State Hospital in GA was 12000. Today the hospital is closing. The state population has increased by a factor of 2.4 since then. So where did all the patients go? Is the care that much better? I would argue no. It's just different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith the introduction of thorazine in the early 1950's, the concept of community-based healthcare began. Along with the deplorable conditions in most mental hospitals, the inpatient numbers dropped. I ask again, where did the patients go?
The estimate of the number of homeless in America varies from 2 - 3 million. At least 50% of these are mentally ill. The answer of the missing patients is that they are all around us, in camps in the woods, in free missions, in halfway houses, & under bridges and in subways. Many bounce to and fro from the penal system unable to cope with our "normal" world.
What is the solution? A tough one. Firstly, in the oncoming age of universal insurance, we must change our entire concept of how to deal with people who cannot function in society because of mental illness. How can personal freedom and humane care be joined to provide sensible care? Some hard decisions are in store. Then again we can leave things as they are.
The mental balance of individuals is to a large degree dependent on the balancing of the world's supply and demand of essential natural resources. Both the insanity of individuals and the lack of adequate facilities to treat them are to a large degree a result of the collective blind spot which prevents us from recognizing the paramount importance of global overpopulation and its myriad effects. Because of overpopulation, many individuals must engage in stressful occupations which may seriously compromise their mental health. One of these hazardous occupations is warfare. Victims of shell shock increase the demand for mental health services. Warfare also decreases the resources available for mental health services.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis collective blind spot is related to the prevalence in modern societies of the "dominator model". Riane Eisler has written extensively on this subject, as well as on the need to consider social problems using a systems engineering rather than a piecemeal approach.
We must first cease the neglect of our collective mental illness. We should be talking about the economy putting a drag on millions of Americans, not the other way around. Prevention should be easier and less expensive than cure. Trying to solve the mental health problems of individuals by legislating the allocation of non-existing resources amounts to nothing more than whistling in the dark.
Antibiotics have been linked to mental illness, When you look at what is injected into animals, Antibiotics, growth hormones (illegal in UK) steroids and so on. so why not look into what is being put into our foods and research the adverse effects that these chemicals have on us, would this not be a cheaper option and surely it would help prevent further cases. It's not just the animals look at all the processed foods, fruit, vegetables, even water. Unfortunately, for the pharmaceutical and chemical companies there profits would take a hit, but that is nothing compared to the quality of life someone would have without mental illness..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom what I have been hearing though, this will not be enough, considering that the US government is thinking of ruling that nonconformity and free thinking are soon to be categorised as mental illness, this in itself will increase big pharma's customer base and profits especially if the person in question is forced into a "nut house" when there is nothing wrong with the individual in question.
Alcohol, Caffeine, tobacco have all been linked with mental illness and caffeine has also been shown to bring on mania, so I suppose you could start there.
Nice comments, and all seem to be about maladaptive behaviors, child abuse, failed coping skills, poverty and the like, leading to chronic depressive issues of one degree or another.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow let's talk about REAL mental illness, such as my only child, a twenty-four year old male, suffers from. Paranoid Schizophrenia, childhood onset. From the age of ten he suffered in silence, a good boy, never getting in trouble and keeping a 3.75 GPA while the hallucinations became worse and worse. Finally diagnosed at the age of seventeen after being institutionalized eleven times he qualified for SSI at the age of nineteen in just forty days. Thank God for medicaid because his meds (24 of them) run close to four thousand dollars a month. His mother quit working to help take care of him and he lives with us, and will until the day we die. He is non-violent, but the Clozapine is slowly killing him; life expectancy somewhere in his fifties. At least his mother and I will be dead before he is. We hope. God bless everyone suffering from this horrible derangement; I would not wish it on my worse enemy. Thank you for caring about the mentally ill.
you should find out if your son is gluten-sensitive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI went through a schizophrenic experience when I was 19. I had a lot of visions and a lot of buried perceptions came up.
I have a very abusive family, and I broke off from them as a result of the visionary experience. I don't like calling it "schizophrenic" because that's negative, and it was very helpful.
I avoided psychiatry like the plague, stopped taking the antipsychotic drugs.
I didn't go crazy again - I'm now 52. But I was VERY anxiety-ridden, my vision was mildly hallucinatory - like my feelings would come out as quasi-visionary experiences.
When I was 43, I found out that I very likely have celiac disease, and many other delayed food allergies. On a special diet, not eating the foods I'd developed these delayed allergies to - things got radically better psychologically. My vision is no longer slightly hallucinatory, I'm MUCH calmer, more emotionally stable, more sociable and more cheerful. I'm very sensitive to these foods. A fraction of a milligram of protein from a food I'm allergic to, will make me sick for days.
The best way to start investigating delayed food allergies is to get a full panel of celiac blood tests - including antigliadin IgG, antigliadin IgA, IgA TtG antibodies and endomysial antibodies. Then, get your son to do a hypoallergenic elimination diet for a week or two; then you try food challenges of the things that were eliminated. If there is a dramatic bad reaction, you know he has an allergy to those foods.
Researchers have been investigating gluten-sensitivity in schizophrenia, for example see "Novel Immune Response to Gluten in Individuals with Schizophrenia" at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2856786/
I'm very glad I didn't take antipsychotic drugs all those years. Right after I went crazy, I was given Prolixin and Stelazine. They practically STOPPED my mind, and I was having involuntary tongue movements. It was a grotesque thing to have to live with. I'd been a brilliant math student, then suddenly I was made into a zombie. And as you mention, these heavy-duty antipsychotic drugs can cause permanent damage.
Celiac disease was underdiagnosed by a factor of 40 in the United States until 2003, when a big epidemiological study showed it is actually fairly common, they found it in 1/133 people. Celiacs are more likely to have psychiatric problems, than people in general. But, the gluten-schizophrenia paper supports the idea that you don't have to have celiac disease to be psychologically affected by gluten.
I'm very uneasy about articles like this, because psychiatric treatment is SO bad. I was diagnosed schizophrenic, forced to take heavy-duty antipsychotics, when I needed a gluten/dairy free diet. If I had been taking those drugs all these years, I'd probably have permanent brain damage by now, I'd likely be obese, and the whole mentality of having my treatment regulated by a psychiatrist would have interfered with my finding out about my delayed food allergies. And "having" to take antipsychotic drugs, which would have had corn starch in them, would have interfered too - I'm virulently corn-sensitive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, as other people have mentioned, the human rights of mental patients are often violated in the name of psychiatric care.
I'm worried that these violations will become entrenched, if psychiatry is given lots more money by increasing insurance for it.
Maybe, possibly, psychiatry will evolve to include gluten/dairy sensitivity (gluten and dairy cross-react), and psychological effects of delayed food allergies. But historically, psychiatry has been a horror story of human rights violations.
When I was checked into the mental hospital when I was 19 - my father took me there - I had to sign a form CONSENTING to lobotomy and electroshock. I wasn't in any shape to protest, and my father didn't stand up for me.
You might be interested in these citations:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNasar, Sylvia "The Man Behind a Beautiful Mind:
8. The real John Nash never saw visions, and after 1970 he never took medication. But his love affair
with Alicia, he says, is 'just like a movie.'" Newsweek March 11, 2002 p52 (780 words)
Rockmore, Daniel "Exploiting a Beautiful Mind." (the real life of John Nash, the mathematician
depicted in 'A Beautiful Mind') The Chronicle of Higher Education Jan 25, 2002 v48 i20 pB18(2)
9. "The real life of John Nash and the effect of mental illness on his career is not what is depicted in the
movie 'A Beautiful Mind.' Nash accomplished most of his important mathematical work before the
career ending onset of paranoid schizophrenia at age 31. After his gradual recovery he won the nobel
prize for economics."
As we can see from the last few references, even when the depiction of someone with mental illness
is sympathetic, it is not about truth or accuracy. It is about drama. One hears that even lawyers have
been known to employ such tactics.
There are sites on the Internet that claim that research has shown that the longer patients stay on psychotropic drugs, the worse their future health. I always check such things with PubMed.gov, the journal abstract database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
As for "real mental illness"; that was just rude. Anyone who was driven to suicide as a child wouldn't say anything that dumb. Even if one knows the nightmares and daymares aren't real, it's no picnic for any of us.
As for godly people, sometimes some of them are the worst. The same righteously over-moral idiots in Arkansas who made my Aunt die of ovarian cancer without any painkillers, just a few years later restricted and withheld them from me after getting my butt crushed by a drinking driver. You never forget the tone of voice of someone jeering while you scream, even if you can't see their faces. If there is an afterlife, I'm sure they don't have to share it with the likes of me.
Because I'm worried about the long term side effects, including, after several trips to the ER with fever and infection, the decreased ability to fight infections, I'm trying alternatives to the medications I've been taking for years. I'm trying N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) and L-methylfolate (Deplin is too expensive) from amazon.com, while slowly decreasing the meds I've been taking. So far, so good, but it takes a long time to see how the cycles go.
I was on benzodiazepines for 15 years. These are quite addictive drugs, and they do tend to make a person go a little nuts after a while. ... but the Psychiatrists have pills to 'cover' the negative effects of benzos - and then pills to cover the negative effects of those pills, and so on...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce on benzos (Many celebrities have succumbed to the negative effects and have died - Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith and most recently Whitney Houston.)...anyway, once on benzos a person does not realize just how much they are falling into an abyss of depression and paranoia until it's too late, and then trying to get off the drug, they feel as though they are going completely insane.
Benzos are very hard to OD on and so it is difficult to
commit suicide on them, but boy, oh boy, getting OFF the drug is another story. People cold turkeying from them have died from seizures! In fact, to be taken off the drug doctors will prescribe anti seizure drugs for that purpose.
If they had told me this from the start I would have never gone on benzos in the first place.
Benzodiazepines are *choreographed insanity*
Benzodiazepines are *tranquilizers* and everybody knows tranks are addictive, and especially nasty.
The doc that put me on the drug called them "anti-seizure" and "anti-anxiety" drugs - never once calling them tranquilizers. (I was put on them for a seizure disorder, migraine headaches and and the anxiety that comes with these headaches .. I had them so bad I was unable to work as this country does not treat ill people very well.)
Yep. Benzodiazepines are choreographed insanity. check out Wikipedia on these drugs - check out the Wiki pages for:
Benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome
Long-term effects of benzodiazepines
These drugs almost guarantee a life-long "mental patient" in some unfortunate individuals. How convenient for the psyche industry!
Now, I am not an adherent to Scientology, but as far as the spyche industry goes, I think they call it right. Check out CCHR and the history of the psyche industry.
Did you know that for a "disorder"to be in the DSM (the 'Bible' of psychiatric industry) the elite of psychiatrists simply "vote" for its inclusion? yeah, there is NO science there.
I have absolutely no respect for the psyche industry as it is now. They simply want to drug patients up and most times never even check for food allergies, or other health issues. Their diagnoses are subjective opinions of Psychiatrists.
It should be unconstitutional for a person to be court ordered to be put on benzos!
Yes, it seems that psychologists and psychiatrists don't think of celiac disease unless someone has obvious GI symptoms like chronic diarrhea or stomachaches.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd people say it can cause manic-depression, panic attacks, learning disabilities, as well as schizophrenia.
People apparently can have these effects from gluten, without having celiac disease. It's another kind of gluten sensitivity.
But people can have celiac disease, WITHOUT GI symptoms. Celiac disease can even be asymptomatic.
This is a big reason why it's been so terribly underdiagnosed. There's a "classic" picture of celiac disease, where people lose weight because they aren't absorbing fat, they have fatty stools that float, etc.
But if someone doesn't fit that picture, they're unlikely to be diagnosed.
I suffered a lot, physically and psychologically, from delayed food allergies for 25 years, without having GI symptoms.
I *did* also have unexplained recurring sicknesses about 6 weeks/year all those years, and I've heard that if food allergies are having psychological effects, you're likely to also be having physical effects.
I don't think that's a diagnostic method - if someone is healthy physically but not psychologically, food allergies might still be involved. But apparently it's less likely.
Isn't it interesting - the only commenter who is compliant with the mental health system, isn't a patient or former patient, but the parent of one! And even that person sees the psychiatric drug their son is on, as very destructive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I was in the hospital in the late 70's, I saw people who'd been there about forever. Stiff-legged from Thorazine, shuffling around, animated dolls. Technically alive, mentally moribund.
And I went to mental hospitals during the 90's sometimes for self-help meetings, and I would see young people drifting around dazed, and I would know: they went crazy and now they're drugged out of their gourds. I doubt it's any better now.
I've heard patients praising Prozac - but antipsychotics - nooo.
Whatever is it like to be on that sort of junk for 25 years? If it's a matter of 25 years in a daze, how is that better than delusions and hallucinations? At least delusions and hallucinations are lively!
New Mexico spends the least on mental health of all the states. Not long ago a man in the next apartment was picked up and put in handcuffs by 6 police who carted him off in a police vehicle. The man was a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds. Being picked up and carted away by the police is pretty much what the New Mexico mental health program is in a nutshell (pardon the expression.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we could just dial down the greed, we could focus on restoring the education, health and mental heaoth systems that helped create America at the top rather than a contender in the 'race to the bottom.'
In this comment you refer to mental health facilities as "loony bins." In another recent comment you referred to people struggling with addiction as "druggies." Has anyone let you in on the little secret that the brain is a part of the body and mental illnesses are kinds of physical illnesses? Did it occur to you that some of us "crazy people" who may need to be "thrown into the loony bin" from time to time might actually be offended by your slang. Not on the basis of political correctness but on the basis of STIGMA?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaladaptive behaviors quite often stem from "real" mental illnesses. That said, it is completely heartbreaking to watch your child (who may also be brilliant and full of potential) suffer in ways that are very difficult to control and medical science actually knows very little about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreatest difficulty of curing mental illness is we have not developed yet reliable technique or medicine on mental illness.There are many techniques psychoanalysis,cogent thinking process and many medicine but they are not giving full grantees to completely cure of mental illness.Back word countries people try to cure mental illness with traditional method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have a thirty second cure for mental illness in the Kadir-Buxton Method. The problem is that the medical profession do not like the threat to their jobs. When Muhammad Ali used it in mental hospitals in the US they threatened to incarcerate him if he did not stop using it. This invention could save the UK alone £100 billion a year, this is the true cost of mental illness, it is worth using the Kadir-Buxton Method simply because there is so much we could do for society with this kind of money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI too would like to address the "reality" of mental illness. I come from a family of 8, and my mother was a health nut, other issues aside, food didn't make me sick. In case anyone missed the memo, mental illness is a "chemical imbalance" in the brain. I don't care if you like drugs or not, making them all out to be bad is entirely unhelpful to the mental health community. A good portion of drugs don't work for me, and were used incorrectly but that doesn't make them inherently bad. So let's address that myth. People with mental health problems don't "go crazy." Their chemicals become imbalanced, and what you or anyone else observes is evidence of that imbalance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMyth #2, it is not about willingness but response. When I was sick and working somewhere 40 hours a week, making 7.25 an hour I was desperate for treatment. But I was making to much money. One time I was asked if I had been to jail, because then I could receive services. Really. I did have one organization who was able to help with my medicine later on, because the qualifications were very simple. It's not that many don't want help, its good luck finding it. There is also a bias existing, if you don't look ill. My brother-in-laws youngest brother took her life several years ago, after struggling for many years. She had been denied disability, and it was noted that she always liked going out looking her best. You pay sometimes, when you choose to fight.
Myth#3: This healthcare bill saved us. I don't know who it saved but it wasn't me. I was denied by three healthcare companies, for a preexisting condition and pay $269 a month for the only health insurance available to me. I pay around $50/month for prescription, only because most of what I take is generic. Most doctors worth their salt don't even want to deal with the health insurance companies.
Going on about food allergies, and the horrible nature of psychiatry, does no one in the mental health community any good. Talk to the face of mental health, the people, the ones who suffer, then come back to me.
I am the first one to recognize the flaws in the medical community, 10 years, 11 hospitalizations and I kept getting sicker, because I was being treated with the wrong drugs. I react to half of the drugs used.
But you don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Medicine almost killed me, but used well it saved me. I asked my doctor a question the other day, and answered that researchers didn't know. Pointing fingers is a waste of time, education and research has my vote.
In reply to aidel, 2/29/12: We can call ourselves and the places that mistreat us what we wish, and throw it right back in their faces. Like the woman with disabilities who once ran a newsletter called The Angry Gimp. I suppose that you are not willing to contribute to my legal defense while I fight back in court, an appeal to the U.S. Tenth Circuit in Denver at the moment, from case 11-CV-92 in the Northern District of Oklahoma. And if you want to see even more political incorrectness, you can follow my blogs on urbantulsa.com in the "Has something made you mad?" section.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou may be interested to know that the Supreme Court 1979 Addington v. Texas decision stated that the standard of proof for civil commitment could not be "beyond a reasonable doubt", because psychiatry could not well predict future danger to the community, and it would put too much burden on the State. In other words, lousy evidence justifies more convictions of innocent and harmless people. So the Court set up the standard of "clear and convincing evidence", which is roundly ignored. In Tulsa, the County District Attorney claimed that the even lower standard of "a preponderance of the evidence" was sufficient.
This has encouraged psychiatric institutions as late as the 1990s to abduct people off the street, even children, to milk their insurance dry. It says that we are a minority, as with the old Southern standard of one drop of colored blood, that if we have any mental illness, we are not fit to get the same civil rights, justice and due process as everyone else.
In Tulsa, this has meant that the local loony bin, which benefits from commitments, and the organization that feeds it candidates for commitment, can provide the only witnesses, mental health evaluation, petitioner and "treatment" needed. And the local mental health public defender doesn't even have to inform a candidate for incarceration of all his or her rights. So, no other sworn witnesses, no presentation of any witnesses for defense, no sworn testimony from accusers or cross-examination.
So don't tell me what to say. Get out there and fight. No one else is going to stand up for you, me or us.
sunflower33,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople don't just know if they have celiac disease, are gluten sensitive or have other delayed food allergies. People who have those problems DON'T typically notice anything special happening when they eat the problem foods.
That's why I didn't even start finding out about my delayed food allergies, including probably celiac disease, until I was 43.
So your saying that you don't have any such problems, means nothing, unless you have gotten yourself tested for celiac disease and then done a careful hypoallergenic elimination diet, followed by food challenges.
Please don't trivialize my experience. You might be severely affected by delayed food allergies yourself.
sunflower33,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople don't just know if they have celiac disease, are gluten sensitive or have other delayed food allergies. People who have those problems DON'T typically notice anything special happening when they eat the problem foods.
That's why I didn't even start finding out about my delayed food allergies, including probably celiac disease, until I was 43.
So your saying that you don't have any such problems, means nothing, unless you have gotten yourself tested for celiac disease and then done a careful hypoallergenic elimination diet, followed by food challenges.
Please don't trivialize my experience. You might be severely affected by delayed food allergies yourself.