Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mrs. DINGELL. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022.

I thank all of my committee members on both sides for months of work on this important bipartisan legislation, which reauthorizes and strengthens critical mental and behavioral health programs that will help address public health issues like the opioid epidemic, which claimed over 107,000 lives in the United States last year alone.

The mental health package before us contains strong mental health parity provisions that my colleague Congresswoman Katie Porter and I led. This will close a critical gap in healthcare coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment for thousands of frontline workers across the country.

It also includes a provision I worked on with my friend and colleague, Congressman French Hill, that provides incentives for co- prescribing when a doctor pairs an opioid prescription with a prescription of an opioid overdose reversal drug like naloxone. This is a proven method to reduce overdose deaths.

Finally, it is good to see consideration of an amendment I coauthored with Congressman McKinley cracking down on suspicious orders of opioids, which will help further curb abuses and save lives.

Mr. Speaker, all of us have had family members or know someone who has had a mental health crisis or issue or suffered from depression. For too long, people have been afraid to even acknowledge it, to seek help, or to get help. There has been a stigma associated with it. Today, all of us on both sides of this aisle need to help remove that stigma.

My sister died of a drug overdose, and my father was a drug addict. Perhaps we wouldn't have suffered some of the traumas had people not been afraid to speak of it.

Mr. Speaker, this is a strong package that will improve our national response, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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