[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 19794]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    MENTAL ILLNESS AND GUN VIOLENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Murphy) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, next week is the third 
anniversary of the sad tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School; but it 
is also time to recall all those other cities in America where 
tragedies have occurred: Tucson, Colorado Springs, Lafayette, 
Charlotte, Chattanooga, Dallas, Houston, Roseburg, Isla Vista, the Navy 
Yard, and closer to my district in Pittsburgh, Franklin Regional High 
School.
  What is common among these tragedies is the lives lost. I keep in my 
office photographs of some of the children whose lives were lost at 
Sandy Hook--Benjamin Andrew Wheeler, Dylan Hockley, and Daniel Barden--
as well as those of teachers and other people from the school. A day 
doesn't go by that I greet them in the morning and throughout the day 
and remember their lives, snuffed out too early.
  But, sadly, the body count is more than just them when it comes to 
dealing with what people with severe mental illness and violence do. 
The body count this year is amazing. There will be 41,000 suicide 
deaths, 43,000 deaths from drug overdose, perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 
homicides, perhaps a couple hundred people who encounter the police and 
are mentally ill and end up with their death, an unknown number of 
homeless who die that slow-motion death of homelessness, and those who 
are mentally ill that die 25 years sooner because of other chronic 
illness.
  The body count this year will be greater than the U.S. combat deaths 
in Korea and Vietnam combined. Will that wake us up to do something in 
this Chamber?

                              {time}  1030

  There are several things we must do:
  We must reform the agency called SAMHSA, which has used Federal money 
over the years for the most ludicrous and preposterous things; from 
designing art for pillowcases to collages and other aspects. We must 
reform the 112 Federal agencies that we pump money into every year to 
deal with mental illness. We have to deal with the shortage of beds. We 
have to get rid of the same-day doctor rule. We have to bring in more 
psychiatrists and psychologists who can provide treatment. We have to 
provide more early intervention and prevention, a greater workforce. 
And this Chamber has to stop postponing action on reforming our mental 
health system and bring to the floor H.R. 2646.
  I have been working with a wide range of Democrats and Republicans 
over the last couple of years to reform this bill, revise it, and 
perfect it. But at some point, if we are serious about helping those 
with serious mental illness, we have to bring it for action.
  Part of what happened is we closed all these asylums years ago and 
thought that if we provided some treatment for people, things would get 
better. States failed to provide that treatment. We shut down hundreds 
of thousands of psychiatric hospital beds and leave people still dumped 
into a system where they don't get care.
  Our current mental health system is hugely discriminatory. The most 
fundamental, dangerous, and destructive hidden undercurrent of 
prejudice is low expectations; that your disability is as good as it 
gets. The shift to consider changes in how we treat severe mental 
health is a pendulum swinging the other way.
  The grand experiment has failed of closing down all the institutional 
care and stopping all treatment. It is a principle that operated under 
the misguided self-centered and projected belief that all people at all 
times are fully capable of deciding their own fate and direction, 
regardless of their deficits and disease, and that the right to self-
decay and the right to self-destruction overrides the right to be 
healthy.
  Those children at Sandy Hook had rights. The people throughout the 
country who are mentally ill have the right to be well and not just the 
right to be sick.
  But to maintain the current philosophy that many have, we abdicate 
comfortably our responsibility to action and live under the perverse 
redefinition that the most compassionate compassion is to do nothing at 
all.
  It further bolsters the most evil of prejudices that a person with 
disabilities deserves no more than what they are. Under that approach, 
no dreams, no aspirations, no goals to be better can even exist. 
Indeed, to help a person heal is a head-on collision with a bigoted 
belief that the severely mentally ill have no right to be better than 
they are and we have no obligation to help.
  This is the corrupt evil of the hands-up approach in the anti-
treatment model. That perversion of thought is embedded in the 
glorification that to live a life of deterioration, paranoia, filth, 
squalor, and emotional torment trumps a healed brain and a true chance 
to choose a better life.
  We have to change this trajectory. When we leave for the holiday 
period here, we will go by another month before we can bring this bill 
to the floor. Two hundred and forty people will die each day being a 
victim or perpetrator because of the mentally ill. For goodness sake, 
if we are going to do anything to help this country, Mr. Speaker, let's 
bring H.R. 2646 for a vote on this floor and fix this problem in 
America.

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