[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
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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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