The Time for Waiting is Over

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, this is Suicide Prevention Month, and we have a lot of work to do. In July the House passed H.R. 2646, our mental health reform act called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act; but since September 1, the beginning of Suicide Prevention Month, 826 people have died by suicide. Since we passed the bill, 7,434 have died from suicide.

Let me tell you one quick story about a young man, a constituent by the name of Chuck Mahoney, who, while in college, suffered from depression. Despite his fraternity brothers going to the administrators and to his counselor, and despite Chuck telling his counselor that he thought he was going to die and there was no reason to live, no one spoke up. No one told the parents.

Sadly, young Chuck, who had been a student, who had been captain of his high school football team, a decorated student with great grades, took his own life, hanging himself with his dog's leash, a suicide that could have been prevented if he had seen people who really could treat suicide.

But so often what happens in this Nation, when someone cries out for suicide risk, there is no one there to help. Actually, as it turns out, mental illness is a contributing factor in 90 percent of suicides. When a person makes a decision, it usually happens in the first 5 minutes or, at the most, the first hour. There is no time for waiting lists.

We have a crisis shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists. We have too few hospital beds. We need something like 100,000 more crisis hospital beds. We have not reauthorized the Suicide Prevention Act in this Congress. We simply don't have enough to treat for a problem that is treatable.

When you add to this people who may do a drug overdose, 90 percent of people who are addicted do not get any treatment. Of the 100 out of 1,000 who try to get treatment, 37 can't find any treatment. Of those 63 left who get treatment, only 6 of them get treatment because we simply don't have enough people to treat. This is the mess we are in as a country, but we can do something about that--but it gets worse.

In addition to these suicide deaths, if you look at just the mental illness-related deaths in this country, since September 1, as of today, 6,713 have died of a mental illness-related death and 60,000 since we passed our bill in July.

The House did its job, but now the Senate needs to do their job. We hear rumors that the Senate is talking about passing the continuing resolution and then going home--going home while this sits on the table in the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that those millions of Americans who have a family member who has been lost to suicide or a chronic illness or a homicide or freezing on some park bench in some unknown part of America, that those families will speak up and let the Senate know: Do not go home and leave this unfinished business on the table. I mean, after all, why campaign and say we could have done something but we didn't?

What we ought to be doing is looking at the passage in the Senate of H.R. 2646, which provides more psychiatric crisis hospital beds, more psychiatrists, more psychologists. It revises the HIPAA law that allows the compassionate communication between a doctor and a family member at very select times when someone is at high risk for their health or safety. It reauthorizes the Suicide Prevention Act. It does a host of other things, and all these things can happen only if it gets to the President's desk for a signature. But very little can happen if we maintain the status quo where people are left to die while Congress sits.

We did our job in the House. It took years, but when we passed this bill 422-2, Members of Congress, Members of the House of Representatives knew that they had passed a bill that could save lives, but only if we take action. If no action is taken, what do we do? What comfort is there to the families who are dying, who are suffering, saying we could have done something but we decided to wait?

The time for waiting is over. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that Members of the House and of the community at large will call their Senators and say the time for passage is now because where there is help there is hope.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source