Jul 21, 2015 3 min read

Amid tales of Dickensian cruelty and abject neglect, there was a rush to close mental hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s, and replace them with other forms of community-based care many advocates believed were more effective and safeguarded the dignity of individuals grappling with mental illness.

However, almost a half-century later, many wonder whether the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. The rush to close psychiatric facilities led to a flood of the deranged taking to city streets in the years after deinstitutionalization, where they were often left homeless and without any treatment at all. Concern for the privacy rights of patients today often means some caregivers are deprived of information they could use in the day-to-day management of their loved one’s condition.

And some of the severely mentally ill often can’t be compelled to seek treatment. The thinking often is people have the “right” to be bonkers, and intervention can only legally occur when that individual is on the verge of committing a crime, or after it happened. This led, in part, to our jails and prisons becoming defacto mental hospitals, with the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center estimating 20 percent of inmates in jails and 15 percent of those in prisons suffer from some form of serious mental illness. In many instances, police have taken on social-work roles when it comes to dealing with those who are mentally ill.

A bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy of Upper St. Clair seeks to bring the scales back into balance. The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015, a slightly revised version of a measure he introduced in the last Congress, seeks to bring order to a chaotic, patchwork system of mental-health care across the country and apply commonsense revisions to how patient privacy is handled. We hope this time around, the measure makes it through the House, wends its way through the Senate and gets to President Obama’s desk.

The proposal, which garnered bipartisan support, would fix a number of the most vexing problems within the mental-health system. Perhaps most urgently, it would provide additional psychiatric hospital beds, which are much needed when estimates have it the United States needs 100,000 more of them. It would also boost funding for research, allow families to have more information on a loved one’s condition, such as medications they are taking and timetables for therapy, and increase crisis-intervention training for law-enforcement officials.

The bill would also address the shortage of mental-health professionals in rural areas by investing in tele-psychiatry, allowing someone in a remote location to speak to a therapist who could be located hundreds of miles away.

Murphy said if the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015 becomes law, it would help prevent the tragedies we have seen in places like Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and, more recently, the shooting at the Navy Operational Support Center in Chattanooga, Tenn. We would point out reasonable gun-control measures and taking steps to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill would also go some way toward reducing the frequency of these mass shootings.

Something like that happening seems unlikely in the current political climate. But something resembling Murphy’s bill could become law. We hope it does.