Dozens of crisscrossing federal programs aimed at helping the mentally ill aren’t coordinating their efforts nearly enough, a new report finds.
More than 100 programs spread across eight federal agencies generally support those with serious mental illness, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by congressional Republicans Thursday. There are so many that officials had trouble identifying them all. And efforts by the programs to coordinate efforts “are lacking,” the GAO concluded.
Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., who has been championing a mental health overhaul bill he rolled out in 2013, called the report “a much-needed wake-up call.” The provisions in Murphy’s bill focus on the seriously mentally ill, a population whose needs he says aren’t being adequately addressed.
“The federal government’s approach to addressing mental illness is a convoluted and disjointed mess,” Murphy said. “Shame on us if we don’t take action and work on fixing the system-wide failures identified in this report so that we can focus resources on helping those in desperate need of medical services for treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and chronic depression.”
The GAO gave two recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services: find a way to prompt coordination among the programs and decide which programs helping the seriously mentally ill should be evaluated and how.
“The absence of this high-level coordination hinders the federal government’s ability to develop an overarching perspective of its programs supporting and targeting individuals with serious mental illness,” the GAO report says.
HHS disagreed with both recommendations, saying improving coordination should be up to Congress and that programs already are coordinating among themselves.
