Mental Health Week
Floor Speech
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank you, Congressman Murphy, for yielding to me. I want to say how fortunate the country is that the people of Pennsylvania have elected you here to serve the people of our Nation with the strong background that you have and with the obvious depths of knowledge that you have about those who are mentally ill and the compassion you have in a field that is very difficult, where the answers still remain incomplete.
I want to be on the floor this evening to say to those who are listening in the Chamber, to those who may be listening outside, your efforts to draft the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, H.R. 2646, is a watershed moment in this Congress.
I have served in this Congress a lot longer than the others on the floor this evening. I was here in 1998 when, sadly, we lost two of our Capitol Police officers, Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson. A diagnosed schizophrenic receiving Federal SSI benefits but off his medicines and estranged from his family headed on a rampage all across the country, all the way from the West to here, and delusionally, he set out to quash, I guess, a purple force he had tracked here to the Capitol.
He broke into the majority leader's office. All the staff went under the desks. I thought, well, maybe this is the moment that Congress will finally face up to the violent impulses that have fallen right at our knees. I said, but I would wager one of two things will happen: either we will finally cut the mustard and do what is right, or we will have more barricades and armed officers. Well, it was the latter option that actually happened.
As we mourn the deaths of nine innocent victims at Umpqua Community College, I commend Congressman Murphy of Pennsylvania for putting a bill forward that forces us to probe deeply the pattern of these mass shootings. We need to know the perpetrators.
We understand the perpetrator in Oregon had served in the U.S. military for a very brief time. He was discharged. And my question to the U.S. military is: Why? Why was he discharged? Did you discharge him to care if you saw a pattern that needed treatment? Or did you close your eyes too? Because that has happened repeatedly in the U.S. military, though I must say that they are doing a little bit better, because some of their own members have now been killed around the country because of individuals who face very severe illnesses in their own lives and have simply never had the kind of doctor to help them come out of the dark shadows of the existence in which they have been living.
Many of these individuals have been abandoned by their families. Many times they are expelled from school.
As you look around the country and you see the people who commit these heinous, heinous crimes and then many times take their own life, they are completely alone or they are living with one member of their family, abandoned by their other family members and, as the gentleman from Pennsylvania has said, many times ending up homeless, the victims of attacks themselves, or many times, out of whatever is happening in a very ill brain, taking it out on the rest of society.
Probing deeply into mental illness requires a discipline that Congressman Murphy has and an understanding that no Congress yet has had. That myopia is symptomatic of what is happening across our Nation: more security but no significant attention to those who show out-of-control and violent tendencies, those tragically mentally ill citizens who are driven by their illness to harm others.
If someone has a broken back, we have special wards. What happens to the mentally ill in the district that I represent and across this country, some of them end up in the jail. Seventy-five percent of those incarcerated in northern Ohio have dual diagnoses of mental illness and substance abuse. What does that tell us? Our jails have become the depositories for this Nation's mentally ill.
I am not saying that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely to commit crimes. I agree with Congressman Murphy that most of them become victims of crimes because they aren't thinking straight, and it doesn't have to be this way.
The bill that Congressman Murphy has written and has vetted and has worked with different groups and individuals, and which I support and a host of other Members do on a bipartisan basis, is supported by one of the most important organizations in our country: the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I have the highest respect for them.
H.R. 2646 fixes the Nation's broken mental health system by refocusing programs, reforming grants, and removing Federal barriers to care. It names an assistant secretary for mental illness at the Department of Health and Human Services, and it encourages more meaningful involvement from family members and caregivers who, frankly, at this point, many times, just give up because they have this force within their homes that they cannot contain.
Rather than just paying tribute to those among us who have been lost and those who save them at risk to their own lives, cannot we elevate the solution to efforts that could help to prevent further tragedies?
We think about the Capitol shootings. We think about Sandy Hook. We think about Virginia Polytechnic. The U.S. leads the world in mass shootings. There have been 294 mass shootings in 2015 alone, and each one gives us an indicator of the possible sign of untreated mental illness. Each one represents a failure of our society, and dispelling the stigma of mental illness for those who suffer remains a task unfinished.
When do the elected Representatives of the American people say, ``Enough. America can do better. America must do better''? Let's create a pathway, by passing H.R. 2646, to immediate treatment for those mentally ill citizens dangerous to others and dangerous to themselves.
Congressman Murphy, I can't thank you enough. I don't recall a bill which has had such broad bipartisan support. You have worked so hard to go around the country. This is not a partisan issue; this is an American issue. I hope America can lead the world in trying to find a better way.
The suffering that we see in our districts, in community after community after community, broken families, broken people, this doesn't have to be in our country.
In the hearing that you conducted in Cleveland, I learned something really important that I didn't know, and that is that in the way that the reimbursement occurs to hospitals for people seeking care, that research in mental illness is at the bottom of the list because reimbursement doesn't flow the same way. So as we try to find answers to what is going on in the human brain, with the secretion of such chemicals like dopamine and serotonin and these different chemicals that those who are healthy have being secreted at a normal level, those who do not have that system working for them have big problems; but yet, if doctors try to get research dollars to solve and figure out what is going on in the human brain, the reimbursement system we have today simply doesn't work. I didn't know that.
So I thank you for coming to Ohio because I am focused on that like a laser beam, and it is a part of the answer. So thank you for allowing me some time tonight on the floor. The people I represent thank you. We want to help you. I hope those listening will find cosponsors from their different parts of the country to help you move this bill forward. We couldn't do anything more important for the country. Thank you.
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