Mental health should be viewed as just another specialty field of primary care in the health care system, not a separate, segregated entity. After all, each person has only one body, with unique mental capabilities, psychosocial relationship abilities and environmental influences.

Such factors impact the events that determine each individual’s life experiences, to varying degrees of healthiness or lack thereof. Knowledge, quality of life, survival skills and coping skills also play a part.

Mental health medical doctors need to be held accountable for prescribing medications only when physiological symptoms clearly define a specific medical condition, just as non-mental health medical doctors are held accountable. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder is a physiological medical condition of the nervous system, involving sensory perception, memory, adrenal glands, neurotransmitter hormones, etc. Talk therapy helps the trauma survivors process their thoughts and feelings about the psychosocial relationships and the environmental traumatic stress disaster event.

Practical, down-to-earth common sense and wisdom about everyday living teaches us that opinions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviors are constantly changing, and cannot be effectively drugged except to suppress and oppress the victim.

Provisions need to be put into place so people can have services paid for by insurance companies without being labeled with a major mental illness and forced to take drugs when talk therapy would suffice.

After all, some things are minor mental health issues or problems that can be resolved.

Pauline M. Bailey, Auburn