Physical Health

For a long time now, mental health and physical health have been treated as separate entities. When you have a mental health issue, you are referred to a completely different set of doctors from when you have a physical ailment. I would like to highlight the issues with this particular paradigm. One of the main issues we all face as we navigate our mental health experience is that your physical health needs are often treated as less important than a person who has not had a mental health experience. This results in people dying younger if they have had a mental health experience. Is it just me, or is this wrong? How have we gotten into a position where people are not treated with the same parity if they have something going on with their mental health? I resolve to highlight this every time I go to the doctors. I call for more of us to highlight to the doctors and medical professionals that people having a mental health experience have a life expectancy 15-20 years lower than the general population. This is abysmal. I'd also like to draw your attention to the idea that because people who have trained in medicine for physical health conditions are uneducated in mental health, they make potentially dangerous assumptions and mistakes. My sister is a mental health nurse who works in A&E. She encountered a doctor who specializes in physical health who was about to indicate to the GP that a patient who had tried to commit suicide would not want to be resuscitated in a future event. My sister had just spent some time working with the patient who had consented to a procedure to save his life. She educated the doctor that this alone indicated the patient's will to live. Luckily, the doctor was open to education. It's this type of uneducated ideology that leads to people like us losing their lives or receiving inadequate physical health care.