[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11919-11920]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE TIME FOR WAITING IS OVER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Murphy) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, this is Suicide Prevention 
Month, and we have a lot of work to do. In July the House passed H.R. 
2646, our mental health reform act called the Helping Families in 
Mental Health Crisis Act; but since September 1, the beginning of 
Suicide Prevention Month, 826 people have died by suicide. Since we 
passed the bill, 7,434 have died from suicide.
  Let me tell you one quick story about a young man, a constituent by 
the name of Chuck Mahoney, who, while in college, suffered from 
depression. Despite his fraternity brothers going to the administrators 
and to his counselor, and despite Chuck telling his counselor that he 
thought he was going to die and there was no reason to live, no one 
spoke up. No one told the parents.
  Sadly, young Chuck, who had been a student, who had been captain of 
his high school football team, a decorated student with great grades, 
took his own life, hanging himself with his dog's leash, a suicide that 
could have been prevented if he had seen people who really could treat 
suicide.
  But so often what happens in this Nation, when someone cries out for 
suicide risk, there is no one there to help. Actually, as it turns out, 
mental illness is a contributing factor in 90 percent of suicides. When 
a person makes a decision, it usually happens in the first 5 minutes 
or, at the most, the first hour. There is no time for waiting lists.
  We have a crisis shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists. We have 
too few hospital beds. We need something like 100,000 more crisis 
hospital beds. We have not reauthorized the Suicide Prevention Act in 
this Congress. We simply don't have enough to treat for a problem that 
is treatable.

[[Page 11920]]

  When you add to this people who may do a drug overdose, 90 percent of 
people who are addicted do not get any treatment. Of the 100 out of 
1,000 who try to get treatment, 37 can't find any treatment. Of those 
63 left who get treatment, only 6 of them get treatment because we 
simply don't have enough people to treat. This is the mess we are in as 
a country, but we can do something about that--but it gets worse.
  In addition to these suicide deaths, if you look at just the mental 
illness-related deaths in this country, since September 1, as of today, 
6,713 have died of a mental illness-related death and 60,000 since we 
passed our bill in July.
  The House did its job, but now the Senate needs to do their job. We 
hear rumors that the Senate is talking about passing the continuing 
resolution and then going home--going home while this sits on the table 
in the Senate.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope that those millions of Americans who have a 
family member who has been lost to suicide or a chronic illness or a 
homicide or freezing on some park bench in some unknown part of 
America, that those families will speak up and let the Senate know: Do 
not go home and leave this unfinished business on the table. I mean, 
after all, why campaign and say we could have done something but we 
didn't?
  What we ought to be doing is looking at the passage in the Senate of 
H.R. 2646, which provides more psychiatric crisis hospital beds, more 
psychiatrists, more psychologists. It revises the HIPAA law that allows 
the compassionate communication between a doctor and a family member at 
very select times when someone is at high risk for their health or 
safety. It reauthorizes the Suicide Prevention Act. It does a host of 
other things, and all these things can happen only if it gets to the 
President's desk for a signature. But very little can happen if we 
maintain the status quo where people are left to die while Congress 
sits.
  We did our job in the House. It took years, but when we passed this 
bill 422-2, Members of Congress, Members of the House of 
Representatives knew that they had passed a bill that could save lives, 
but only if we take action. If no action is taken, what do we do? What 
comfort is there to the families who are dying, who are suffering, 
saying we could have done something but we decided to wait?
  The time for waiting is over. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that Members of 
the House and of the community at large will call their Senators and 
say the time for passage is now because where there is help there is 
hope.

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