D. J. Jaffe who strongly backed Rep. Murphy’s mental health bill joins others in the hearing giving Murphy a standing ovation.
(6-15-16) As expected, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), passed bipartisan mental health legislation by a unanimous vote of 53-0 today. The bill – House Resolution 2646, the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, was introduced by Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-PA) in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.
What the committee passed is known as an amendment in the nature of a substitute (AINS) which in laymen’s terms means legislation that has been greatly revised after months of everyone arguing about it.
While the compromise bill negotiated by Chairman Upton doesn’t contain several of Murphy’s most controversial proposals, Murphy said he never wavered from his original objectives. (see video.) You can read my earlier blog about what was cut from his original bill here.
Murphy has been relentless and tireless in pushing for mental health reform since 2013, saying he wanted the legislation to be one of his legacies. He is widely credited with getting Congress to undertake its first serious effort in decades to reform our broken mental health system.
The Murphy bill now mirrors a Senate bill that originally was a spin off of his legislation. It was introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.). Once both pass their respective chambers, the two bills will be meshed into one for a vote before being sent to the president for his signature, making it a law.
I received several celebratory emails from readers who lobbied for the bill’s passage. I also received a telephone call from a person with mental illness who was distraught because she felt the bill will strip her of non-medical services, a common concern raised by opponents.
“We need more than medical solutions. People need recovery oriented programs that help someone with something as simple as finding a friend who can go to a movie with them,” she said. “Murphy’s bill will end all of that because those services will not be judged evidence based but are still necessary for us to feel connections and be human.”
Murphy has said his bill will not cut treatment services that help people recover but it will stop frivolous SAMHSA spending. During a series of hearings, Murphy cited examples of SAMHSA funded projects that he described as being anti- psychiatry and wasteful.
One example was a workshop called “Unleash the Beast” that promised to help attendees learn about mental illness by studying animal movements. SAMHSA’s former Chief Medical Officer recently published a scathing article that said top agency managers at SAMHSA were openly hostile toward the use of psychiatric medicine, refused to focus on helping the seriously mentally ill, and questioned whether bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were even real, arguing that psychosis is just a “different way of thinking for someone experiencing stress.”
Much of Murphy’s efforts were aimed at redirecting the agency.
