Chairman Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) reintroduced the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, H.R. 2646. The revamped bill builds upon the previous bipartisan version. H.R. 2646. It breaks down federal barriers to care, clarifies privacy standards, expands parity accountability, invests in services for the most difficult to treat cases, and drives evidence-based care. Rep. Murphy said, “We are moving mental health care from crisis response to recovery, and from tragedy to triumph.”

The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act was first introduced in December 2013, following a yearlong investigation led by Oversight Chairman Murphy into the nation’s broken mental health system. The investigation revealed that the federal government’s approach to mental health is a chaotic patchwork of antiquated programs and ineffective policies across numerous agencies.

As documented in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, 112 federal programs intended to address mental illness aren’t connecting for effective service delivery. Also, there is a lack of inter-agency coordination for programs supporting people with serious mental illness.

While the federal government dedicates $130 billion towards mental health each year, the mental health system is best described by its deficits. To name just a few:

• There is a nationwide shortage of nearly 100,000 needed psychiatric beds.
• Three of the largest mental health hospitals are criminal incarceration facilities.
• Privacy rules frustrate physicians and family members and generate nearly 8,000 official complaints a year.
• Only one child psychiatrist is available for every 2,000 children with a mental health disorder.
• The leading federal mental health agency does not employ any psychiatrists.

The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015, H.R. 2646 would do the following:

• Create an Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders with mental health credentials within HHS. The assistant secretary would elevate the importance of mental health in the nation’s leading health agency, coordinate programs across different agencies, and promote effective evidence-based programs.
• Require the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders to make public all federal investigations into compliance with the parity law so that families and consumers know what treatment they have rights to access.
• Establish a National Mental Health Policy Laboratory to drive innovative models of care and develop evidence-based and peer-review standards for grant programs.
• Dedicate funding for the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative.
• Require psychiatric hospitals to establish clear and effective discharge planning to ensure a timely and smooth transition from the hospital to appropriate post-hospital care and services.
• Provides additional psychiatric hospital beds for those with an acute mental health crisis who need short term (less than 30 days) immediate inpatient care.
• Support advances in tele-psychiatry to link pediatricians and primary care doctors with psychiatrists and psychologists in areas where patients don’t have access to care.
• Require the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders to study and recommend a national strategy to increase the number of psychiatrists, child and adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, clinical social workers, and mental health peer-support specialists.
• Include child and adolescent psychiatrists in the National Health Service Corps.
• Authorize the Minority Fellowship Program.
• Authorize, for the first time in federal law, the Recovery After Initial Schizophrenia Episode (RAISE), an evidence-based early intervention program.
• Reauthorize the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
• Launch an early childhood grant program to provide intensive services for children with serious emotional disturbances in an educational setting.
• Provide incentives to states to offer community-based alternatives to institutionalization.
• Reauthorizes the Garrett Lee Smith Suicide Prevention Program, invest in research on self-directed violence, and authorize, for the first time in the statute, the Suicide Prevention Hotline.
• Extend health information technology for mental health providers to coordinate care with primary care doctors using electronic medical records.
• Establishe an inter-agency Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee to organize, integrate, and coordinate the research, treatment, housing and services for people with substance use disorders and mental illness.
• Ends the decades-old prohibition on physicians volunteering at community mental health clinics and federally qualified health centers.

Congressman Murphy, a psychologist with nearly three decades experience, has been a champion for reforming the broken mental health system. He yearly introduces the bipartisan congressional resolution declaring May as Mental Health Month, to end the stigma associated with mental illness and promote public awareness of mental health. He will soon advance a similar resolution recognizing the month of June as PTSD Awareness Month. A provision in the previous version of his Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act was recently adopted on the House floor. Murphy offered a bipartisan amendment with Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2016, to advance and expand Mental Health Courts, a successful model of collaboration between criminal justice and mental health systems for those with serious mental illness.