Finally A Light At The End Of The Tunnel - Mental Health Overhaul

Trigger

Two recent articles report about recent efforts in the U.S. Congress to reform mental health care in the U.S. This is long overdue! Finally, someone in the U.S. Congress

“A Mental-Health Overhaul/A Congressman produces a set of good ideas for a difficult problem.” (Subscription required, but if you use Google Chrome it appears to be free access) published in the Wall Street Journal on 12/25/2013.

“A law to fix mental health care” by Sally Satel published by the American Enterprise Institute on 12/22/2013.

Kudos And Thanks!

Please be grateful for U.S. Representatives like Timothy F. Murphy (R) from Pennsylvania who is reported to be a driving force behind this reasonable reform effort.

Salient Features

I will focus here on the WSJ article as it may not be as accessible.

Emphasis added:

1. “The feds spend a stunning $125 billion a year on "mental health" via programs ranging from Medicaid to the Social Security Administration. Yet the Murphy committee discovered that most of this cash goes to vague and ineffective services rarely focused on treating the most serious illnesses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression. There is little interagency coordination, little government data collection on treatment outcomes, and no central effort to drive evidence-based care.” [As you would expect if Big Government runs health care!]
2. “The Murphy bill would reorient all of this and create a new HHS assistant secretary for mental health and substance-abuse disorders who would lead federal mental-illness efforts. … An example: One NIMH project showed that identifying the first sign of psychosis in an individual, and immediately treating it with lower-dose medication, could prevent a patient from developing full-blown schizophrenia and allow a functioning life. These are the treatments that federal dollars need to be supporting. The new assistant secretary would take over the grant process; ...”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “... 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. … Seventy years ago the U.S. had 600,000 inpatient psychiatric beds for a country half its current population. Today it has 40,000.” “A similar shortage of psychiatric professionals—especially for children—has meant the average time between a first episode of psychosis and initial treatment can be 110 weeks. The Murphy bill addresses this by advancing tools like tele-psychiatry, which links primary physicians in underserved areas to psychiatric professionals. Speaking of children, the law finally fixes the federal privacy law known as HIPAA, once again allowing mental-health professional and families to share information about loved ones.”
6. “The Murphy legislation also addresses one of the more destructive forces in the mental-health system: the legal lobby. Many Americans may be shocked to know their tax dollars are funding a small army of self-anointed "advocates" who encourage the mentally ill to avoid treatment, and who fight parental and court attempts to get them care. The Murphy bill stops this funding. It also gives physicians legal safe harbor to volunteer at understaffed mental-health centers, something many currently won't do for fear of malpractice suits.”

Can you believe this all this sheer insanity that has been going on for decades! This is what Big Government run healthcare looks is like!

Gun Control Red Herring

It is a shame how many of our legislators and the current U.S. President Obama have engaged in numerous new gun control proposals etc. These are terrible populists exploiting tragic events committed by underserved mentally ill perpetrators.

A Cry For Help!

I do not want to justify or excuse or condone any of these horrible events where a mentally ill person killed or maims a number of innocent people. However, some of these mentally ill people are smart.

Perhaps, these horrible events were kind of cries of help or a sort of brutal reminder in a society who still treats mental illness as a great taboo and stigmatizes the sufferers.

Previous, Related Blogs

See here, which has references to other blog posts.