Rep Murphy Announces Opposition to Government Funding Measure

Thank you Congressman Murphy for not giving

up on families who need treatment before tragedy!

12/10/14

Murphy Pledges to Keep Fighting For Families in Mental Health Crisis
Announces Opposition to Government Funding Measure

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Contact: Brad Grantz, 202.225.2301

(WASHINGTON, DC) — Congressman Tim Murphy (PA-18) released the following statement today explaining one of his many concerns with, and why he will oppose, the $1.1 trillion government funding package expected to be voted on in the House of Representatives tomorrow:

“Access to evidence-based treatment significantly improves the lives of those with serious mental illness and brain disorders. I am disappointed the Assisted Outpatient Treatment program was not funded in this spending bill. Authorized by Congress and signed into law by the President this year, AOT is a life-saving program to help patients and families in mental health crisis for whom the alternative has been a revolving door of jail, homelessness, victimization, and violence,” said Rep. Tim Murphy.

“What we need is treatment before tragedy. This bill continues to fund the tragedy side and not the treatment most needed for the severely mentally ill. Instead of continuing to fund the status quo of failed and wasteful SAMHSA programs, money for prisons to incarcerate the mentally ill, and homeless programs for those with brain disease who live a life of misery on the margins of society under the worst of conditions, there are models of tremendous success across the country we could be investing in like Assisted Outpatient Treatment.

“AOT empowers families and treatment providers to work together so patients can function in the community with the highest degree of independence. I’ve met with countless family members from across all corners of our country who have the unconquerable courage to fight the stigma of serious brain disease and never given up hope to find care for their loved one in our broken mental health system. They inspire me every day and I remain steadfast in my commitment to achieve meaningful mental health reforms in Congress on their behalf.”

Background on the Assisted Outpatient Treatment Grant Program for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness:

Section 224 of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (Public Law 113-93) authorized an Assistant Outpatient Treatment (AOT) program. AOT is a successful alternative to long-term inpatient care for those with mental illness cycling through the system but never receiving needed care. AOT has been proven to save money for state and local governments by reducing the rates of imprisonment, homelessness, substance abuse, and costly emergency room visits for individuals with a persistent and serious mental illness.

AOT is a component of the bipartisan Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, which Dr. Murphy authored following a year-long investigation into the nation’s broken mental health system. Nationwide support for his legislation to grow from newspaper editors, physicians, and parents of children with mental illness. The legislation includes provisions to increase hospital beds and proper care while decreasing criminalization for people with serious types of mental illness; reform the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to increase family access to information and eliminate barriers to communication between families and providers; permit federal Medicaid dollars to be used to pay for acute inpatient psychiatric treatment by creating an exception to the current Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion in Medicaid; expand effective Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) services; increase funding to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); re-appropriate the budget of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to increase support for programs designed to help those with the most severe cases of mental illness.

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Beginning this January, Rep. Tim Murphy will enter his seventh term representing Pennsylvania’s 18^th congressional district, which encompasses suburban Pittsburgh and parts of Allegheny, Washington, Westmoreland and Greene Counties. Rep. Murphy also serves as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserve Medical Service Corps as a psychologist treating Wounded Warriors with post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. Prior to serving in Congress, Dr. Murphy, author of “The Angry Child” and “Overcoming Passive-Aggression,” was a practicing psychologist specializing in child and family treatment.

Treatment rather than punishment -- long overdue!

It's Time to Change Tennessee's Mental Health Laws!: Treatment rather than punishment: Let's Do This in...: New York City Announces Plan to Overhaul Criminal Justice System for People with Mental Illness (Dec. 4, 2014) New York City announced a...

Policing the Mentally Ill by: Chief Michael Biasotti

"Treatment before tragedy …

New Windsor (NY) Police Department Chief Michael Biasotti, former President of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, writes in Law Enforcement Today: 


is important to people with serious mental illness and their families. But families sometimes fail to recognize it is also something police have a vested interest in..." Our families recognize what you are saying, Chief Biasotti. Thank you to NAMI New York State for recognizing your good work. We all have a vested interest in a safer society for all.  Treatment Before Tragedy

"Today there are approximately 35,000 mentally ill persons in public hospitals. However ten times that number, 350,000 are in prisons and jails."

- See more at: http://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/2014/11/20/policing-the-mentally-ill/#sthash.xE3pfJe0.Kt7Pqo3O.dpuf

ABC this is NOT OK! Disney/ABC Marginalizes Mental Illness In Tasteless Modern Family Episode

I am writing to ask why Disney/ABC Television ridiculed and marginalized our nation’s veterans and millions of other Americans during the October 29th broadcast of its prime time television show, Modern Family.

Pete Earley writes 2 spot-on articles this week about the distasteful, insulting and discriminating “Modern Family” show portraying asylums and mental illness as funny.

Mr. ABC executive, I challenge you to live in my shoes just one day. Try living my life … ask me if I'm amused by my son's horrible 21-years of documented brain disease? Imagine watching your son's brain deterioate, due to civil rights laws that keep him from gaining access to treatment? Please click here: http://abc.go.com/feedback and provide your thoughts on how families and individuals coping with the most challenging and deadly disease on the planet deserve an apology! Thanks, GG Burns  

BY PETE EARLEY

‪

 An Open Letter to Anne Sweeney, Co-Chair Disney Media Networks President, Disney/ABC Television Group

Dear Ms. Sweeney,

Twenty-two veterans commit suicide each day in our nation. Nearly all have a diagnosable mental illness. Many have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that they suffered fighting for your safety and freedom. Yet, the writers of Modern Family:Halloween 3: AwesomeLand decided to make these proud warriors the butt of belittling jokes. Read more here: http://www.peteearley.com/2014/10/30/stigmatizing-modern-family-disneyabc-marginalizes-mental-illness/

Small Steps: 50,000 Read My Complaint About Modern Family; Express Anger and Disappointment

read more here: http://www.peteearley.com/2014/11/01/small-steps-50000-read-complaint-modern-family-express-anger-disappointment/

How Liza Long's blog post helped families organize to become #Tb4T

I’m so excited because Liza Long's new book, "The Price of Silence" arrived in my mail today! I am late in ordering it, but can't wait to read it!

Like thousands of other Moms, I wrote to Liza the day her "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" blog post went viral. (NOTE: 1.2 million people have read Liza's story on Huffington Post to date.) 

Additionally, I wrote my own story and published it on my blog titled: “My response to I Am Adam Lanza's Mother.” 

That day, millions were in shock, disbelief and mourning the senseless death of 26 children, but it was also significant turning point. It was the beginning of families like mine that survive in mental health crises connecting across the US! 

In the past 2 years, we have used social media to develop relationships that eventually led us to organize and become a new non-profit organization/movement call "Treatment Before Tragedy".

In another post, I'll share more details of how I met Asra Nomani, after she published "Did Nancy Lanza live in fear? Why many mothers of the mentally ill do” in the Washington Post. Asra has been and remains instrumental in helping families acheive the unthinkable!

  

For now, please join me in thanking Liza Long for her brave stand to ask the  questions publically ... that many of us were too afraid to ask.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across 

the waters to create many ripples. – Mother Teresa

In the days after the Newtown, Ct., tragedy, one mother represented the voices of so many: Liza Long, "Anarchist Mom." She testified to the abyss in which so many families are drowning in trying to get care for loved ones with serious mental illness, or brain disease, as we want to reframe the issue.

For being a champion for families everywhere, we thank Liza and congratulate her on her release of her new book, "The Price of Silence." 



Let's support this mom who has supported us and let the world know: 

We matter. Our loved ones matter. 



Read this essay by Liza on what this day means to her: http://treatmentbeforetragedy.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/the-price-of-silence/

GG Burns is a Mother, Artist and Kentucky Mental Health Advocate

Cofounder: http://treatmentbeforetragedy.org/

Founder: http://changementalhealthlawsinky.blogspot.com 

Stigmatizing and Shunning the Severely Ill | Huffington Post

This article by Dr. Allen Frances hits the nail on the head. People with severe mental illness/brain diseases, who don't believe they are ill and lack capacity for informed consent, are allowed to live in the community delusional, dysfunctional, and "YES" often dangerous to themselves and their family! Medical providers in our community recently stated that perhaps my son would received "treatment in jail" … since he has the right to refuse it in the community! Yet even in prison, he has rights to refuse the care he needs to restore his brain function! Only in Amercia are laws this insane! Thanks to the laws that protect his civil rights … he had only received “3 weeks of medical treatment in 2014” for a brain disease that has a 21-year documented history! 

While NAMI and other national mental health groups focus on bringing awareness that mental illnesses are treatable and spend millions on anti-stigma campaigns … both they and society are turning a blind eye to what is really going on behind the scenes due to the fight over funding. Consequently funds are being rerouted to the justice system, jails and prisons. Dr. Frances’ article explains this with great detail.

Families of individuals with “severe mental illness/brain diseases” deserve humane "TREATMENT Before TRAGEDY". 

GG Burns - 
"Advocate and a Mother who is unable to help her son" 

BY ALLEN FRANCES|Posted: 07/30/2014 7:26 pm EDT Updated: 09/29/2014 5:59 am EDT

"We are civilized people in the United States. We don't set up leper colonies or concentration camps or psychiatric snake pits to banish people with severe mental illness. Instead we send them to jail or prison -- almost 400,000 of them, more than 10 times the number receiving care in hospitals. And we also blithely ignore the fact that additional hundreds of thousands live homeless on the streets or in squalid housing and have little or no access to treatment.

The extreme absurdity of our system is perhaps best illustrated when some of our mentally ill are reduced to repeatedly inviting arrest in order to get "three hots and a cot." For them a restricted life behind bars beats a chaotic and dangerous life on the streets.

But for most prison is a living nightmare. People with mental illness don't adapt well to its rituals and dangers. They are vulnerable targets for physical abuse, rape, and prolonged (further crazy-making) solitary confinement. Our society's mismanagement of the severely mentally ill is a disgrace -- perhaps not quite as bad as medieval witch hunting, but close behind."

We can't in any way excuse it, but how do we explain the lousy care and subsequent shunning to prison and street? Some of the neglect certainly arises from felt economic necessity; many states have been forced to sharply slash spending to balance budgets, and one of the easiest things to cut is mental-health funding. But the fundamental reasons must go much deeper. The same states, simultaneously and without much notice or qualm, have radically increased their appropriations for prisons, despite the fact that it is much more expensive to cruelly imprison people with severe mental illness than to compassionately treat them in the community. It is penny-wise and pound-foolish to shortchange community treatment and housing while wasting funds on inappropriate prison beds.

The best explanation for this irrational distribution of scarce resources is the stigma of severe illness. We begrudge the severely ill the necessary funding for humane and cost-effective care but don't seem to mind locking them up in expensive and soul-destroying prisons.

Dictionary definitions of "stigma" describe it as a mark of disgrace, shame, dishonor, ignominy, opprobrium, humiliation, or bad reputation unfairly attached to a person, group or quality. Tellingly, the "the stigma of mental disorder" is almost always offered as the first and most classic example.

A troubling paradox has, I think, developed in the stigma attached to mental illness: Never has there been less stigma for having mild psychiatric problems, but never has there been more stigma for having severe ones.

This has come about because the definition of "mental illness" is now so loose: One in four of us qualifies every year, one in two across a lifetime, and one in five is taking a psychiatric medicine. 

There is enormous power in these numbers. 

The sting of having a psychiatric diagnosis or receiving treatment is much reduced when so many people take psychiatric medication or participate in psychotherapy."

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/stigmatizing-and-shunning-the-severely-ill_b_5634135.html

Lets do more than "WALK" or "TALK" during Mental Illness Awareness Week

Some people will spend a few hours this week talking about stigma and how they wish they could help a friend or loved one living with a mental illness. Take a pledge to do more than "WALK" or "TALK" … call your US congressman and help pass national legislation that will stop the discrimination of the sickest, eliminating barriers to gain timely treatment before tragedy. 

‪#‎passhr3717‬ ‪#‎tb4t‬