Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza suffered from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was driven by delusions. A psychologist said Alex Hribal was on the schizophrenia spectrum before stabbing his high school classmates.
After every mass shooting or stabbing over the past three years, Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., has pushed harder for his broad mental health reform bill, legislation he says could have helped the perpetrators get the treatment they needed before committing terrible crimes.
Yet a subcommittee hearing is the furthest his bill has progressed. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., has said he will bring it before the full committee at some point, but House leaders haven’t committed to doing anything with it at all.
And that has the Pittsburgh-area Republican frustrated.
“It’s disgusting people keep putting this off,” Murphy told the Washington Examiner. “I can’t use strong enough words to describe my feelings on this … We just gotta get leadership to get this going. Otherwise, shame on us, shame on Congress.”
Just weeks after the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting that left 26 dead, including 20 children, Murphy started a year-long investigation into the U.S. mental healthcare system, holding multiple hearings and poring through oversight reports.
Through the process, he wrote his 173-page “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act,” which seeks to correct what he sees as long-term neglect of programs and resources to help people struggling with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that land many of them on the streets or in prison.
To Murphy, federal agencies such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration pour too many resources into helping people who might struggle occasionally with less severe mental illness, such as depression, and don’t put enough focus on those struggling to hold down a job or stay out of legal trouble because of the mental problems they face.
“At SAMSA, there have been things like ‘drink a fruit smoothie if you’re stressed,’ make a mask, make a collage, do an interpretive dance,” Murphy said. “This is where our federal dollars have been wasted instead of treating this problem.”
There’s no guarantee that passing Murphy’s legislation would have saved the lives of the dozens who have died in mass shootings, which have been rising in recent years. An FBI report last year found an average of 16.4 shootings a year from 2007 to 2013, compared to an average of 6.4 shootings annually from 2000 to 2006.
And not every mass killing is committed by someone with a serious mental illness, said Ron Honberg, policy director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “I think we have to be very, very careful not to link all these tragedies with serious mental illness,” Honberg said.
But Murphy contends his bill at least would have made it easier for perpetrators such as Lanza, Alexis and Hribal, who received minimal mental health evaluation and treatment before going on their killing sprees, to get access to the care they needed.
When asked whether one killing affected him in particular, Murphy points to the mass stabbing at Franklin Regional High School in April 2014, which occurred just outside his southern Pittsburgh district. Sixteen-year-old Hribal, who struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, knifed 20 of his classmates, seriously injuring many of them.
Murphy also mentions the 2000 killing spree in Pittsburgh by Richard Baumhammers, who killed five people and paralyzed one.
“Each time I see this I’m upset by it, but each time I hope it motivates a member of Congress to wake up,” Murphy said.
While an estimated one in four people in America experience some kind of mental illness, those who suffer from serious mental health problems are relatively few, about one out of 17 people, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates.
But they are disproportionately represented in prisons and on the streets. About 20 percent of prisoners have had a mental health problems, and an estimated 26 percent of homeless adults staying in shelters live with a serious mental illness.
“We’re now in a situation where if you have a serious mental illness, you are much more likely to be arrested or in prison than receive care in a hospital or in the community,” said John Snook, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center.
Murphy’s bill aims to improve the situation by providing additional psychiatric hospital beds for those experiencing mental health crises and need a place to stay where they get treatment and can’t do harm to themselves or others. It provides states with extra mental health funding if they run high-quality assisted outpatient treatment programs, which allow a judge to order a severely mentally ill person to receive treatment even if he or she is unable or refuses to give consent.
The bill also allows Medicaid to pay for mental health services provided the same time as physical health services, something for which the program does not currently reimburse providers. And it makes it easier for families to obtain critical medical information about a severely mentally ill family member, as patient privacy laws often prevent caregivers from learning of a patient’s whereabouts or condition if they flee home.
“The worst-case scenario — someone living with their family is picked up by an ambulance and the family can’t find out anything,” Snook said. “Two weeks later, they’ll find them in a homeless shelter.”
Mental health experts do not agree on how to fix the problems with the U.S. system, and a few holdout groups notably haven’t signed on to the Murphy bill, including the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and Mental Health America.
But the vast majority of groups have endorsed it, including the alliance, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Murphy hopes by getting more advocates on board, he eventually will convince Congress to make his mental health reform a priority.
“It’s embarrassing, it’s disgusting to me that it takes so long.”
This article appears in the Sept. 8 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
