Insurance Fraud & Kanye West: Capitalizing off Black Bodies When the 13th Amendment Isn’t Enough
Kanye West’s net worth amounts to around one hundred forty-five million dollars.
One hundred and five million dollars were from concerts alone.
A bottle of Risperdone, otherwise known as Risperdal, containing 30 tablets, costs roughly $300-$400, depending on an individual’s medication provider, their insurance, and their location. Not to mention, individuals have different dosages. One person might take two tablets a day, thus meaning that an individual will spend $600-$800 a month on atypical antipsychotic medication.
In a world where slavery, lynchings, and other forms of apparent human rights violations are inherently illegal, as well as frowned upon, it would seem that in our capitalistic, vulture-ridden economy, the only way to harm a group of people, legally, is with a dollar bill.
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There is no privacy on a psychiatric ward. The doors are all propped open, and remain that way for the entirety of your stay, with the exception of the exits and the bathrooms, as well as the door to your therapist’s office.
When you are not being peered at by a fellow patient, you are being observed by a young, eager nurse with a clipboard, or a psychiatrist attempting to figure out whether or not your medication is working. You are a spectacle. People take turns staring at you, from shift to shift, from patient to patient. The only privacy you have is that of your own mind, but even then, you’re not allowed to be left alone with your own thoughts. After all, that’s why you’re here.
When Kanye West took the stage at the VMA’s, and began spewing nonsensical scripture and jargon, I did not laugh. My friends and I had a viewing party at my place. As we laid observing his unfolding and apparent inability to remain coherent and maintain a linear form of thought, they flailed and laughed and tweeted. I pitied him. I waited. I nodded.
When he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, everyone around me reeled. How could something so funny be such an indication of something so sick. I was not surprised in the slightest. Instead, I nodded. I thought about Four Winds.
My downward spiral was not on a stage at Madison Square Garden, or the comfort of Ellen DeGeneres’ couch. It was in the halls of a middle school, which sat in the upper-right hand corner of a sleepy suburban town in Westchester, New York. I was the wallflower type: I kept to myself, I spoke only when spoken to, and I understood many, most of them for the sake of understanding.
I began thinking and speaking about death. I fantasized about it, I brought it up to my friends at random points during the day. I dreamt about it. It should not have surprised me when I found myself in a board room with administrators, social workers, and my mother, proposing I go ‘seek an evaluation’ from psychiatric experts at a hospital a half hour away.
The same year that I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital—against my will, and much of my knowledge—was the same year that Kanye West climbed on stage and snatched Taylor Swift’s microphone from her hands and declared that she was undeserving of an award.
When Kanye West climbed up on stage and snatched a microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands, I smiled, and I thought that this was a man I could get along with, and that wasn’t something nice. I knew what was happening to him before it happened to him.
I told them I was feeling better. I told them I think, soon, I was ready to go home.
They smiled, and agreed.
When my mother arrived, they told her how I’d been getting worse, and how they weren’t sure they were going to be able to discharge me. I needed more medication, they informed her. It was the only way to keep me from losing my mind. As I continued becoming sedated, Kanye West brought in more and more money, and both the billing office of Four Wind’s, and Kanye West’s team, celebrated. They were getting rich. We were getting sicker.
One problem we as a country seem to face is that we believe slavery being over means that racism suddenly vanished from American culture, and that the minds who were so hell-bent on hate and bigotry, would some how come to senses simply due to the fact that a few laws were passed.
In America, about $20 billion of the $100 billion that are lost to health care fraud are from the mental health industry’s own practices of fraud (cchr.org). Mental health has been monopolized by psychiatrists, and other private health care entities, and as mental health seems to be a rising issue, so does the amount of fraud that goes on around the subject.
The closer you want to be to Kanye West’s breakdown, the more it costs. As he believes he gets richer, the white men who write his checks get even richer than that. He is inadvertently and unknowingly selling his mental health in exchange for fame, and it’s the people who are buying into the deconstruction and tampering with black mental health that need to be stopped. Kanye West is a household name, which is a noble feat, but at what risk?
We have to remember that there is something to be said about the fact that capitalism itself demands so much incessant negligence and dehumanization of individuals. While these people are no doubt wrong and disturbing in their practices, we have to also remember what drives these practices each and every time they occur. Before we ask why Kanye West seems to be going off the rails so willingly, or why I was taking enough pills to make me sleep 23 hours a day, ask who allowed Kanye West to get on those stages, or who wrote the prescriptions for those medications in the first place.
Ask yourself, at what cost does it come to be Black and mentally ill in America?