[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 129 (Thursday, September 26, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H5840-H5841]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MENTAL ILLNESS AND GUN VIOLENCE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from
Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) for 5 minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, with the tragic mass shooting last week at
the Washington Navy Yard, our country has again been ravaged by
preventable gun violence. America must confront these events and their
causes to prevent future tragedies.
Since 2007, according to the FBI, there have been 146 reported mass
shootings. Far too often, a large contributing factor to this recent
surge in violence is untreated mental illness; and in far too many
instances, the perpetrators are former members of our military. Our
Nation must bridge the gaps in our current mental health system to
avoid more tragedies.
The President recently unveiled his BRAIN Initiative. It calls for
$100 million in funding to advance our understanding of the human mind.
Supporting this proposal will go a long way to furthering our
understanding of the causes and conditions that afflict those who wish
to harm others and themselves.
Further, Congressman McKinley of West Virginia and I have introduced
H.R. 1615, the Examining America's Mental Health Services Act of 2013.
The bill requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the
National Academies' Institute of Medicine to conduct a comprehensive
study on the gaps in our Nation's mental health services and to explore
how these gaps increase the risk of violent acts. Experts such as
former Army Vice Chief of Staff Dr. Peter Chiarelli, Dr. Joseph
Calabrese of Case Western Reserve University, U.S. Army Colonel Carl
Castro, and Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, head of the Stanley Foundation, would
be prime candidates to lead breakthrough national initiatives on mental
health.
Part of our comprehensive effort should focus on (1) accelerating
funding for brain research and neuropsychiatric treatment; (2),
reforming military enlistment, discharge procedures and integrating the
Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs' medical
records systems; (3), instituting early childhood behavioral screening
in schools; and, (4), restricting gun and ammunition access to those
who have serious behavioral disorders.
Additional focus on mental illness and gun access is imperative. The
Navy Yard tragedy resulted in the deaths of 13 of our citizens with
eight additional people injured. The perpetrator, Aaron Alexis, was
aged 34, a Navy Reserve veteran and a contractor to the U.S. Navy. He
joined the Naval Reserve and began experiencing conditions that many
would describe as related to PTSD, with demonstrable neuro conditions
such as schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia. However, he was
allowed to purchase a Remington 870 pump action shotgun and two boxes
of ammunition. Individuals who suffer from these types of ailments
should not have access to weapons and stockpiles of ammunition.
Unaddressed mental illness continues to be prevalent in many of our
Nation's traumatic mass shootings, and they involve perpetrators who
are private citizens as well.
We recall so sadly in Tucson, Arizona, when our own former dear
colleague, Rep. Gabby Giffords, and current colleague, Representative
Ron Barber, miraculously survived a mass shooting in which six others
lost their lives after a deranged gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, opened
fire at a meeting at a local supermarket at which Giffords and
constituents were gathering.
We saw it at nearby Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui
Cho took the lives of 32 people; and we saw it at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in December of 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza ended the lives
of 20 children and seven adults after taking his own mother's life and
then his own.
How many more calls for attention--for help?--does America need to
hear?
The killing of two Capitol Police Officers over a decade ago, here in
our Capitol, was perpetrated by a man who had been diagnosed as a
paranoid schizophrenic who was off his medication, alienated from his
family and who got access to a gun.
Congress should be deeply concerned that civilians, as well as our
brave men and women who serve or who have served in our Armed Forces,
are not receiving the medical treatment required for diagnosing
debilitating mental illness and trying to treat it better. An annual
Department of Defense report on suicide has shown a precipitous
increase in military suicides over the course of the last 5 years. In
2012, there were 349 suicides by military men and women from all
branches of the Armed
[[Page H5841]]
Forces. That is more than all the combat deaths that same year in
Afghanistan. This is an epidemic and requires more attention and
investment, including the BRAIN Initiative put forward by the
President.
In sum, the common denominator with many of these mass shootings is a
mentally ill individual with access to deadly weapons who has not been
treated properly or, many times, whose mental illness has not even been
evaluated. America must address these deficiencies for the benefit of
our entire society. We must accelerate research to unlock the mysteries
of the human brain.
Mr. Speaker, the only question is: Do America's leaders on behalf of
the American people have the courage and vision to embark on a serious
national conversation about mental health and mental illness?
The White House,
Office of the Press Secretary,
April 2, 2013.
Fact Sheet: BRAIN Initiative
``If we want to make the best products, we also have to
invest in the best ideas . . . Every dollar we invested to
map the human genome returned $140 to our economy . . .
Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock
the answers to Alzheimer's . . . Now is not the time to gut
these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now
is the time to reach a level of research and development not
seen since the height of the Space Race.''--President Barack
Obama, 2013 State of the Union.
In his State of the Union address, the President laid out
his vision for creating jobs and building a growing, thriving
middle class by making a historic investment in research and
development.
Today, at a White House event, the President unveiled a
bold new research initiative designed to revolutionize our
understanding of the human brain. Launched with approximately
$100 million in the President's Fiscal Year 2014 Budget, the
BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies) Initiative ultimately aims to help
researchers find new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent
brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and
traumatic brain injury.
The BRAIN Initiative will accelerate the development and
application of new technologies that will enable researchers
to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how
individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact
at the speed of thought. These technologies will open new
doors to explore how the brain records, processes, uses,
stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and
shed light on the complex links between brain function and
behavior.
This initiative is one of the Administration's ``Grand
Challenges''--ambitious but achievable goals that require
advances in science and technology. In his remarks today, the
President called on companies, research universities,
foundations, and philanthropists to join with him in
identifying and pursuing the Grand Challenges of the 21st
century.
The BRAIN Initiative includes:
Key investments to jumpstart the effort: The National
Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, and the National Science Foundation will support
approximately $100 million in research beginning in FY 2014.
Strong academic leadership: The National Institutes of
Health will establish a high-level working group co-chaired
by Dr. Cornelia ``Cori'' Bargmann (The Rockefeller
University) and Dr. William Newsome (Stanford University) to
define detailed scientific goals for the NIH's investment,
and to develop a multi-year scientific plan for achieving
these goals, including timetables, milestones, and cost
estimates.
Public-private partnerships: Federal research agencies will
partner with companies, foundations, and private research
institutions that are also investing in relevant neuroscience
research, such as the Allen Institute, the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute, the Kavli Foundation, and the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies.
Maintaining our highest ethical standards: Pioneering
research often has the potential to raise new ethical
challenges. To ensure this new effort proceeds in ways that
continue to adhere to our highest standards of research
protections, the President will direct his Commission for the
Study of Bioethical Issues to explore the ethical, legal, and
societal implications raised by this research initiative and
other recent advances in neuroscience.
Background
In the last decade alone, scientists have made a number of
landmark discoveries that now create the opportunity to
unlock the mysteries of the brain, including the sequencing
of the human genome, the development of new tools for mapping
neuronal connections, the increasing resolution of imaging
technologies, and the explosion of nanoscience. These
breakthroughs have paved the way for unprecedented
collaboration and discovery across scientific fields. For
instance, by combining advanced genetic and optical
techniques, scientists can now use pulses of light to
determine how specific cell activities in the brain affect
behavior. In addition, through the integration of
neuroscience and physics, researchers can now use high-
resolution imaging technologies to observe how the brain is
structurally and functionally connected in living humans.
While these technological innovations have contributed
substantially to our expanding knowledge of the brain,
significant breakthroughs in how we treat neurological and
psychiatric disease will require a new generation of tools to
enable researchers to record signals from brain cells in much
greater numbers and at even faster speeds. This cannot
currently be achieved, but great promise for developing such
technologies lies at the intersections of nanoscience,
imaging, engineering, informatics, and other rapidly emerging
fields of science and engineering.
Key Investments to Launch this Effort
To make the most of these opportunities, the National
Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, and the National Science Foundation are launching
this effort with funding in the President's FY 2014 budget.
National Institutes of Health: The NIH Blueprint for
Neuroscience Research--an initiative that pools resources and
expertise from across 15 NIH Institutes and Centers--will be
a leading NIH contributor to the implementation of this
initiative in FY 2014. The Blueprint program will contribute
funding for the initiative, given that the Blueprint funds
are specifically devoted to projects that support the
development of new tools, training opportunities, and other
resources. In total, NIH intends to allocate approximately
$40 million in FY 2014.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: In FY 2014,
DARPA plans to invest $50 million in a set of programs with
the goal of understanding the dynamic functions of the brain
and demonstrating breakthrough applications based on these
insights. DARPA aims to develop a new set of tools to capture
and process dynamic neural and synaptic activities. DARPA is
interested in applications--such as a new generation of
information processing systems and restoration mechanisms--
that dramatically improve the way we diagnose and treat
warfighters suffering from post-traumatic stress, brain
injury, and memory loss. DARPA will engage a broad range of
experts to explore the ethical, legal, and societal issues
raised by advances in neurotechnology.
National Science Foundation: The National Science
Foundation will play an important role in the BRAIN
Initiative because of its ability to support research that
spans biology, the physical sciences, engineering, computer
science, and the social and behavioral sciences. The National
Science Foundation intends to support approximately $20
million in FY 2014 in research that will advance this
initiative, such as the development of molecular-scale probes
that can sense and record the activity of neural networks;
advances in ``Big Data'' that are necessary to analyze the
huge amounts of information that will be generated, and
increased understanding of how thoughts, emotions, actions,
and memories are represented in the brain.
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