[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 13379]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              HELPING FAMILIES IN MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Murphy) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, the Helping Families in 
Mental Health Crisis Act reforms our broken and harmful mental health 
system. Here are some reasons why we need it.
  For some who are experiencing the most serious mental illnesses, like 
bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they don't think their 
hallucinations are real; they know they are real. Their illness affects 
their brains in such a way that they are certain, beyond all doubt, 
their delusions are real. It is not an attitude or denial. It is a very 
real brain condition.
  With that understanding, we are left with a series of questions: Do 
these individuals have a right to be sick, or do they have a right to 
treatment? Do they have a right to live as victims on the streets, or 
do they have a right to get better? Do they have a right to be disabled 
and unemployed, or do they have a right to recover and get back to 
work? I believe these individuals and their families have the right to 
heal and lead healthy lives.
  But they are sometimes blinded by a symptom called anosognosia, a 
neurological condition of the frontal lobe which renders the individual 
incapable of understanding that they are ill.
  Every single day, millions of families struggle to help a loved one 
with serious mental illness who won't seek treatment. Many knew that 
Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, and Elliot 
Rodgers needed help.
  Their families tried, but the individual's illness caused them to 
believe nothing was wrong, and they fought against the help. These 
families watch their brother, their son, or their parent spiral 
downward in a system that, by design, only responds after crisis, not 
before or during. The loved one is more likely to end up in prison or 
living on the streets, where they suffer violence and victimization, or 
cycle in and out of the emergency room or commit suicide.
  In a recent New York Times article about Rikers Island prison, they 
report that over an 11-month period last year, 129 inmates suffered 
injuries so serious that doctors at the jail's clinics were unable to 
treat them; 77 percent of those inmates had been previously diagnosed 
with mental illness.
  Rikers now has as many people with mental illness as all 24 
psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined, and they make up 
nearly 40 percent of the jail population, up from about 20 percent 8 
years ago.
  Inmates with mental illnesses commit two-thirds of the infractions in 
the jail, and they commit an overwhelming majority of assaults on jail 
staff members. Yet, by law, they cannot be medicated involuntarily at 
the jail, and hospitals often refuse to accept them unless they harm 
themselves or others.
  Is that humane? Shouldn't we have acted before they committed a crime 
to compel them to get help?
  According to the article, correctional facilities now hold 95 percent 
of all institutionalized people with mental illness. That is wrong. Yet 
with all we know about mental illness and the treatments to help those 
experiencing it, there are still organizations, federally funded with 
taxpayer dollars, that believe individuals who are too sick to seek 
treatment will be better off left alone than in inpatient or outpatient 
treatment. It is insensitive. It is callous. It is misguided. It is 
unethical. It is immoral. And Congress should not stand by as these 
organizations continue their abusive malpractice against the mentally 
ill.
  The misguided ones are more comfortable allowing the mentally ill to 
live under bridges or behind dumpsters than getting the emergency help 
that they need in a psychiatric hospital or an outpatient clinic 
because they cling to their fears of the old asylums, as if medical 
science and the understanding of the brain has not advanced over the 
last 60 years.
  We would never deny treatment to a stroke victim or a senior with 
Alzheimer's disease simply because he or she is unable to ask for care. 
Yet, in cases of serious brain disorders, like schizophrenia, this 
cruel conundrum prevents us from acting even when we know we must 
because the laws say we can't. We must change those misguided and 
harmful laws.
  The system is the most difficult for those who have the greatest 
difficulty. Why are some more comfortable with prison or homelessness 
or unemployment, poverty, and a 25-year shorter life span?
  I tell my colleagues: Do not turn a blind eye to those that need our 
help. The mentally ill can and will get better if Congress takes the 
right action.
  Tomorrow, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas and I will 
hold a briefing at 3 p.m. on the rights of the seriously mentally ill 
to get treatment. I hope my colleagues will attend and understand that 
we have to take mental illness out of the shadows by passing the 
Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, H.R. 3717, because where 
there is no help, there is no hope.

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