Rep. Murphy Responds to White House Proposal on Background Check Rules

Chairman Tim Murphy welcomes discussion on treatment side of mental illness!

For Immediate Release: Friday, January 3, 2014

(WASHINGTON, DC) — House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (PA-18) made the following statement today following the public release of a White House proposal for two new administrative rules on addressing barriers to uploading state records of the dangerously mentally ill into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

“I’m encouraged to see the assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) model of care being recognized as a legitimate and important way to help the mentally ill who are committed by a judge to treatment in the community. AOT saves lives, money, and makes sure treatment is accessed through the healthcare system rather than the criminal justice system, which is why my Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 3717) encourages states and counties to utilize AOT programs.”

“While this proposal targets the HIPAA barrier preventing hospitals from communicating with the justice system, we must fix the HIPAA barrier preventing physicians from communicating with the parents and caregivers of the severely mentally ill.”

“I will be examining the details of this proposal in the coming days but I remain singularly focused on advancing my Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act and getting the 11-plus million Americans with serious mental illness the treatment they desperately need. Ultimtely, the most needed reforms in mental health policy must be debated and enacted through Congress.”

Last month, Rep. Murphy unveiled landmark mental health reform legislation, the Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 3717), following a year-long investigation into the nation’s broken mental health system.

Praise and support for Murphy’s bill has come from parents’ groups, the nation’s leading mental health professionals, and newspaper editorial boards including the Wall Street Journal, which wrote that the legislation is “an informed attempt to overhaul a broken system” that “might even prevent the next Newtown.”

Dr Insel's (NIMH) video on how we should change "Mental" Illness to Brain Disease!

It's long overdue and time that "mental disorders or behavioral health problems" such as Bipolar and Schizophrenia, be reclassified as Brain disease! 

Thank you NIMH and Dr Insel. 

Click here for more info
:http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/updates/2013/mental-disorders-as-brain-disorders-thomas-insel-at-tedxcaltech.shtml

A rethink is needed in terms of how we view mental illness, stated National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas Insel, M.D., in a recent TEDx talk at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

Deaths from medical causes such as leukemia and heart disease have decreased over the past 30 years. The same cannot be said of the suicide rate, which has remained the same. A vast majority of suicides—90 percent—are related to mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.

Insel believes part of the problem is that mental illness is referred to either as a mental or behavioral disorder. “We need to think of these as brain disorders,” he said, adding that for these brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change.

SAMHSA Webinar on AOT

If you missed it earlier this month, this Webinar on AOT is a MUST WATCH!

SAMHSA Starts a Conversation on AOT -- published by the Treatment Advocacy Center (Dec. 3, 2013) The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a federal agency charged with improving the quality and availability of mental health services, presented a highly illuminating public seminar yesterday on assisted outpatient treatment (AOT). Held at SAMHSA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland with live webcasting to hundreds of registrants, the event included Treatment Advocacy Center Policy Director Brian Stettin as a panelist. In the first half of the program, Duke University professors Marvin Swartz and Jeffrey Swanson gave highlights of the many AOT studies that they have conducted in New York and North Carolina, dating back to the late 1990’s. Their findings made a persuasive case that if properly implemented, AOT is a cost effective means to improve outcomes for people with severe mental illness who struggle with treatment adherence. In the panel presentation that followed, Brian cautioned against misinterpreting Drs. Swartz and Swanson’s findings to mean that AOT was only useful in states with ideal availability of community-based services. The panel also featured Dr. Stephanie Le Melle, Co-Director of Public Psychiatry Education at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, who spoke of the positive results she has had in treating patients under AOT, and Chaku Mathai, a peer advocate and longtime AOT opponent. Archived video of the four-hour seminar can be viewed here: http://services.choruscall.com/links/samhsa131202.html While we have certainly taken our shots at SAMHSA over the years for inattention to the needs of people with severe mental illness, today we offer only praise for facilitating this critical discussion. In her remarks, SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde promised that yesterday was “only the beginning” of the agency’s plans to keep AOT in the spotlight. Count us in for whatever’s next. To comment, visit our Facebook page. Visit our blog archive to read all our recent posts.

Time to talk - a parent's perspective on children's mental illness: Liza Long

Is there a better solution for homeless individuals like Henry Earl? Arrested 1500 times!

Could a separate outpatient law called, “Assisted Outpatient Treatment”, (AOT) help this man and others like him? 

Which is more humane and inexpensive – spending longer sentences in jail, (60-90 days at a time) or requiring Earl to live in a shelter or supportive living environment, receiving proper medications, (instead of self-medicating) a few nutritious meals coupled with needed resources, other than AA classes in jail?

Alcoholism is a disease the last time I checked. People say until you want to quit, nothing will change for people like Earl and they will drink until they die. But perhaps Earl is too sick to understand he needs to quit?

Dec 25, 2013 11:59 AM by Josh Kegley
See video here: 

With that said, please notice the comment under the article by a woman named Alice Bradford who compares Earl to a dog!

When did when we lose our compassion for the most vulnerable citizens in the US, who are forced to survive on the streets and would rather be locked up in jail? 

When President Kennedy passed the Community Mental Health Act,

50 years ago, to move patients with mental illness from hospitals into the communities, did he imagine this would be how many of these patients would survive? 

How is " free choice" working for Earl's civil liberties? 

And how is this failed system saving money? 

The entire miserable account is the definition of insanity!

Read more here about a 64-year old Lexington man who has cost Lexington taxpayers more than $50,000 in the last two years. And the cost stretches back for decades - since 1992; Earl has been arrested on average 50 times per year - or about once a week. This is not an isolated case, just one that has picked up the attention of national media sources. 

LEX 18 NEWS INVESTIGATES http://www.lex18.com/news/lex-18-investigates-judges-taking-a-harder-line-on-henry-earl/

One national article of many was recently published by CNN. There must be a better solution folks!

Most-arrested man to face judge as friends hope for 'Christmas miracle'

By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN

updated 5:42 PM EST, Wed December 4, 2013

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/us/kentucky-henry-earl-most-arrested/

WSJ EDITORS PRAISE THE HELPING FAMILIES IN MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS ACT

12/26/13

From the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

subscribe here to read online:http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304367204579267030770210744

A MENTAL-HEALTH OVERHAUL

A Congressman produces a set of good ideas for a difficult problem.

A year has passed since the Newtown massacre, and Americans this month marked the somber moment. The most fitting tribute Congress could pay the 26 victims would be to return in January to take up Pennsylvania Representative Tim Murphy's thoughtful overhaul of federal mental-health policies.

Severe mental illness is the common link among the recent mass shootings, and for decades the political class has ignored the systemic dysfunction in a mental-health system that fails the sickest. Getting to the root of this problem is hard, which is why Congress defaults either to spending more money or brawling over gun control.

The Murphy bill also uses grant money to push states to modernize their mental-illness laws. Some 23 states still allow for involuntary commitment only if a mentally ill person is an imminent danger to himself or others. This standard is nearly impossible to meet, and even psychotics are often able to present a brief façade of normality. Many are unaware they're even ill and won't voluntarily get help.

Community mental-health centers would only receive grants if their state's commitment laws include a "need for treatment" standard, which gives families and physicians greater ability to get help for the mentally ill. Grants would also flow only to centers in the 44 states that have assisted-outpatient treatment laws, in which courts can require the mentally ill, as a condition of remaining in a community, to receive treatment. New York's Kendra's Law has been a model for how these outpatient treatment laws can help the most vulnerable and save lives.

The bill includes other pressing reforms, like removing the federal bias against hospital psychiatric care. Medicaid currently won't reimburse for psychiatric care in any hospital that has more than 16 psychiatric beds. This restriction has led to the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, releasing the mentally ill to commit crimes and receive subpar treatment in jails. Seventy years ago the U.S. had 600,000 inpatient psychiatric beds for a country half its current population. Today it has 40,000.

Read more on Rep. Murphy's home page here: http://murphy.house.gov/latest-news/wsj-editors-praise-the-helping-families-in-mental-health-crisis-act/

HR 3717 introduced by Rep Murphy: Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act

Rep. Tim Murphy, PhD, Chairman of Oversight and Investigations

 "AND WHERE THERE IS NO HELP, THERE IS NO HOPE." 

More than 11 million Americans have severe schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression yet millions are going without treatment and families struggle to find care for loved ones.

The federal government’s approach to mental health has been a chaotic patchwork of antiquated programs and ineffective policies across numerous agencies. Sadly, patients end up in the criminal justice system or on the streets because services are not available.  

This Act fixes the nation’s broken mental health system by focusing programs and resources on psychiatric care for patients and their families most in need of services.

1.) Empowers Parents and Caregivers

2.) Breaks down barriers preventing doctors and mental health professionals from talking to parents about mentally ill loved ones who are in an acute mental health crisis, regarding HIPPA laws

3.) Fixes Shortage of Inpatient Beds

4.) Increases access to acute care psychiatric beds for the most critical patients

5.) Alternatives to institutionalization

6.) Provides alternatives to inpatient care through court-ordered ‘Assisted Outpatient Treatment’ or AOT — which reduces rates of imprisonment, homelessness, substance abuse, and costly ER visits for the chronically mentally ill

7.) Reaches undeserved and rural populations

8.) Advances tele-psychiatry to link pediatricians and primary care doctors with psychiatrists and psychologists in areas where patients don’t have access to mental health professionals

9.) Creates Assistant Secretary for Mental Health (HHS) to coordinate federal government programs and oversee evidence-based models of care developed by the National Institute of Mental Health at Community Mental Health Centers. Ensures federal programs are optimized for mental health and patient care rather than bureaucracy

10.) Stabilizing patients beyond the ER

11.) Protects classes of drugs so physicians can prescribe the appropriate medications for mental health patients enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid (similar to epilepsy, cancer)

12.) Advances critical medical research

13.) Authorizes the BRAIN research initiative at the Nat’l Institute of Mental Health.

14.) Promotes High Quality Behavioral Health Clinics

15.) Improves quality and expands access to integrated medical and mental healthcare at community mental health providers

16.) Demands Department Of Justice Reforms

17.) Reauthorizes mental health courts so patients are treated in the healthcare system and not warehoused in the criminal justice system and more

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View Rep. Murphy's 5 minute speech on Floor of House announcing the "Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act". http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4477276

The complete text of The Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act can be viewed here.

A summary of the legislation is provided here.

Here's what's in Rep. Tim Murphy's Mental Illness Bill (12/12/13)

http://mentalillnesspolicyorg.blogspot.com/2013/12/heres-whats-in-rep-tim-murphys-mental.html

YOU CAN HELP BY:

Calling your Representative and ask him/her to co-sponsor and support the "Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act" (HR 3717) sponsored by Rep. Tim Murphy. 

The fastest way to find your Rep phone number is to enter your zip code at  http://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup -- or see the list below. 

District 1 Whitfield, Ed, R, 202-225-3115, Energy and Commerce 202-225-3115

District 2 Guthrie, S. Brett, R, 202-225-3501, Education and the Workforce

202-225-3501

District 3 Yarmuth, John A., D, 202-225-5401, Energy and Commerce 202-225-5401

District 4 Massie, Thomas. R, 202-225-3465, Oversight and Government Reform Science, Space, and Technology Transportation and Infrastructure

District 5 Rogers, Harold, R, 202-225-4601, Appropriations, Chairman 202-225-4601

District 6 Barr/Lexington, Andy, R, 202-225-4706, Financial Service

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Letters of support from the following organizations:

Treatment Advocacy Center

American Psychological Association

New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc.

American Psychiatric Association

National Alliance on Mental Illness

National Sheriffs' Association

Mental Illness Policy Org

Email Congressman Murphy: https://murphy.house.gov/contact-me D.C. Office or call to express your support: (202) 225-2301