[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 107 (Monday, August 3, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1524-E1525]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               IN TRIBUTE

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. MARGE ROUKEMA

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 28, 1998

  Mrs. ROUKEMA. Mr. Speaker, in a few tragic moments of July 24, the 
peace was shattered at the U.S. Capitol and two members of the United 
States Capitol Police lost were killed in the line of duty. The work of 
the Congress paused last week to remember the sacrifice of John Gibson 
and J.J. Chestnut.
  The investigation into this horrible tragedy is continuing. Without 
seeking to prejudge the outcome of that investigation, the senseless 
death of two police officers has proved to the world what many of us 
already know: there are gaping holes in the network of services 
designed to identify, assist, and treat those people with mental 
illness.
  To this end, I will be working with my colleagues, Representative 
Marcy Kaptur of Ohio in particular, to develop an organized response to 
the Capitol tragedy. We will be working with the joint Congressional 
Leadership to design a method by which we can evaluate and respond to 
the mental health crisis facing this nation.
  In this context, I would like to draw the attention of my colleagues 
to a column by Frank Rich which was published in the New York Times of 
July 29. It should be required reading for every Member of the House 
and Senate.

                [From the New York Times, July 29, 1998]

                         This Way Lies Madness

                            (By Frank Rich)

       The Capitol police officers Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson 
     had hardly been declared dead when Senator Robert Torricelli, 
     the New Jersey Democrat, sent out a press release arguing 
     that tighter gun control could have prevented the tragedy. 
     Not missing a beat, Trent Lott was soon arguing that a $125 
     million bunker-barricade camouflaged as a visitors' center 
     would repel future assailants. But in a city where most 
     politicians are so ignorant about mental illness that they 
     still think Whitewater, not the disease of depression, drove 
     Vincent Foster to suicide, no one said the obvious: It is the 
     gaping cracks in American mental-health care, not in Capitol 
     security or gun-control laws, that most clearly delivered 
     Russell Weston Jr. to his rendezvous with history.
       Mr. Weston's paranoid schizophrenia surfaced long ago. Yet, 
     as The Times reported, this now 41-year-old man ``received no 
     regular psychiatric treatment or medication over the last two 
     decades and [his] family seemed to understand little about 
     how to seek help for him.'' This is hardly an anomaly. E.

[[Page E1525]]

     Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist who campaigns for better 
     mental-health care through the Treatment Advocacy Center in 
     Arlington, VA., says that of the 2 to 2.5 million Americans 
     with schizophrenia, ``40 percent are not receiving treatment 
     on any given day.'' Cases like Mr. Weston's--in which a 
     mental patient eludes follow-up care and medication after a 
     hospital release--number ``in the hundreds of thousands.''
       How does this happen? Nearly as heartbreaking as the 
     preventable murders of officers Chestnut and Gibson is the 
     plight of Mr. Weston's family. They obviously love their 
     child; they knew he was sick; they wanted to get him help. 
     But, as Russell Sr. said: ``He was a grown man. We couldn't 
     hold him down and force the pills into him.'' A comprehensive 
     system of mental-health services, including support for 
     parents with sick adult children who refuse treatment, 
     doesn't exist. If it had, the Westons might have had more 
     success in rescuing their son--as might the equally loving 
     family of Michael Laudor, the Yale Law School prodigy charged 
     last month with murdering his fiancee.
       That safety-net system doesn't exist because mental illness 
     is still in our culture's shadows--stigmatized, misunderstood 
     and therefore the beggar of American health care. Though Mr. 
     Weston's home state of Montana offers particularly skimpy 
     services, the national baseline is ``not high,'' says Dr. 
     Torrey. Poorly covered by health insurance and spottily 
     served by overcrowded and underfinanced public institutions, 
     mental illness is ``the last discrimination,'' as Michael 
     Faenza of the National Mental Health Association puts it, 
     even though we now have the science to treat mental illness 
     at a success rate comparable to physical illness.
       It's not only politicians who are complicit in this 
     discrimination. The media sometimes compound the ignorance 
     that feeds it. Too many commentators look at Mr. Weston's 
     symptoms--such as his paranoid delusions about the CIA--and 
     lump him in with gun-toting, anti-government ideologies, 
     making no distinction between the clinically ill and 
     political extremists. A Time reporter, on the hapless CNN 
     show ``Newsstand,'' expressed surprise that Mr. Weston would 
     so easily be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic given that 
     he had no previous ``episodes of violence.''
       In fact, the majority of those ill with paranoid 
     schizophrenia are not violent, and the disease has no 
     ideology. As Sylvia Nasar's new book, ``A Beautiful Mind,'' 
     documents, many of Mr. Weston's oddest symptoms (including 
     the conviction he was being beamed encrypted messages) also 
     characterized the paranoid schizophrenia of John Nash, the 
     brilliant, nonviolent Princeton mathematician who won the 
     Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
       Back in 1835, one of the very first patients at 
     Washington's Government Hospital for the Insane--as St. 
     Elizabeth's Hospital was then known--was Richard Lawrence, a 
     pistol-armed man who tried and failed to assassinate Andrew 
     Jackson in the Capitol's Rotunda and was then pronounced not 
     guilty by reason of insanity in a trial whose jury 
     deliberations took five minutes. More than a century and a 
     half of medical and economic advances later, what kind of 
     progress is it that we still so often fail to treat the 
     mentally ill until after tragedy strikes?

     

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