The president’s recent executive order on gun control and violence included initiatives focused on people with mental illnesses. As he said, many have and will continue to focus on mental illness as an alternative to gun control. It’s a false argument, and he was correct to say so.
The reality is that there has long been a need for comprehensive mental health reform. This is not because of the supposed connection to violence, but because the simple reality is that our system is broken.
While some people with mental illness want to harm themselves or others, the vast majority do not. And while some people who want to do harm have a mental illness, the vast majority do not. When people with mental illnesses do engage in violent acts — including homicide and, far more frequently, suicide — it is never the first symptom of the illness, only the last one.
The president did not intend to add to the categories of individuals in the Brady Act for whom it is illegal to possess firearms. He did not single out more individuals who have experienced mental illness, or sought treatment voluntarily, to limit their second amendment rights.
That’s a good thing, because half of us will have a mental illness at some point in our lives, and more than one in five have a diagnosable mental illness each year. The last thing we want to do is to give them more reasons not to seek help at the earliest possible stages of the illness.
The president also supported putting $500 million into mental health treatment. There is a bipartisan consensus that more support for mental health services is needed, and that consensus has been emerging more clearly as H.R. 2646 (often called the “Murphy bill”) advances through the house, and S. 1945, a similar bill co-sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat, moves forward in the Senate. It is important that the president agrees.
These dollars could be used to support the prevention, early identification, early intervention, and integrated health services that are included in both the House and Senate bills. They can fund both innovative and evidence-based programs. They can help train more providers and peers to increase the mental health workforce.
And they can help realize the vision included in H.R. 2646 to end the incarceration of nonviolent offenders with serious mental illness within ten years, and direct those savings to rebuilding the community mental health system — because an irony is that in closing one set of institutions in the mid-to-late twentieth century that imprisoned people with mental illness, we opened up another set and called them county jails and state prisons.
Some people have raised concerns about one of the president’s initiatives. The Social Security Administration will be developing a rule to share the names of those people who are Social Security or SSI recipients — and for whom it is already illegal to possess firearms — with the FBI. They worry that this may in the future lead to the erosion of second amendment rights for millions of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, as well as mental illness.
If it did, we and a host of others in the mental health community would object. So we’ll see about that one.
But let’s not take our eyes off the ball. There is a lot we can do today both to promote mental health and to make our country a little safer. President Obama’s efforts are but a step in that direction. As he noted, there is much more that Congress can do now, and we all must come together to make this happen. Lives depend on it.
For some, the president’s order may go too far; for others, not far enough. But, like H.R. 2646 and S. 1945, the order offers us an opportunity to intervene earlier and more effectively on behalf of people who experience mental illnesses. It allows us to address mental health and mental illness long before it gets to a crisis stage — before Stage 4.
For the good of the nation, we should take advantage of these opportunities. And we should start building the kind of community-based system of mental health services we were once promised.
Paul Gionfriddo is president and CEO of Mental Health America. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
