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WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate urging his  colleagues to pass his bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act of 2015 – a bill he introduced with U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to comprehensively overhaul and strengthen America’s mental health care delivery system. The Mental Health Reform Act will make critical reforms to address a lack of resources, enhance coordination, and develop meaningful solutions to improve outcomes for families dealing with mental illness. Murphy and Cassidy, who are both members of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, introduced the legislation in August after months of collaborating with Connecticut’s mental health professionals, policy experts, consumers, and families.

The full text of Senator Murphy’s remarks is below:

I'm here on the floor today to join my good friend from Louisiana, Senator Cassidy, as we introduce to the chamber, formally, the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015. And I want to thank him very personally for all the time that he has put into this not just as a member of the Senate, but previous to this as a member of the House of Representatives. This effort is patterned after a bill that Senator Cassidy and my namesake, Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, worked on for years in the House of Representatives.

I just want to begin by sharing a story with you. That's the way Senator Cassidy ended. I'm going to talk about a woman from Bloomfield, Connecticut. Her name is Betsy. She has a 28-year-old son, John, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder – it’s a serious mental illness. His signs began showing when John was 15 years old. He was hospitalized – think about this – 15 different times between the ages of 15 and 18 years old, generally only for really time-limited stays ranging from about five days to maybe two weeks. And despite the severity of the condition, he was told that upon discharge there was really nowhere for him to go, no permanent solution for this young man. He was just in adolescence, but his parents were told that there was no place for him to be treated, and what resulted was not only John getting to a breaking point, but his parents as well. As we know, serious mental illness doesn't affect the individual person, but the family members who are trying to care for them.

Without needed supports and services, John became increasingly remote and psychotic until he was hospitalized again. Upon discharge this time, John went to a shelter – the only place that he could go. Since he couldn't follow the shelter's rules, John, who his mother said was young, fragile, vulnerable and mentally unstable, was kicked out to survive homeless on the streets. Now, John finally was able to get a bed that was able to house him for longer than two weeks at Connecticut valley hospital. And that ability to get John stabilized for a longer period of time – get him into a real treatment plan – allowed him to then transfer into a community bed in Middletown, Connecticut.

That's where John is today. John's been living out in the community successfully for three years. But we spent millions of dollars on John's care that led to no better outcome for him. We wasted millions of dollars and potentially thousands of hours of time because he shuttled in and out of hospitals without any long-term treatment, and without any hope for him and his family. And what Senator Cassidy and I are trying to say is that there's a better way.

We're already spending billions of dollars on inadequate mental health care in this country. Now, we need to do better, but a lot of this is just about spending money in a more effective way. Now one of the programs which our bill helps fund is an early intervention program for individuals who show their first episode of psychosis. The program that the National Institute of Mental Health just evaluated, with findings released yesterday, was the RAISE program. But in Connecticut, we run a similar program called the STEP program. What this study showed yesterday is that if you provide wrap-around services to an individual who shows a first episode of psychosis with comprehensive immediate services, that you can get a dramatic decrease in the number of episodes that they show later in life. In Connecticut, we found that the STEP program reduced hospitalizations by nearly 50% after you gave those wrap-around services immediately. And when they did need hospitalizations later on, they were on average six days fewer than when you didn't provide these wrap-around services.

These are the types of programs that could have helped Betsy’s son, John, early so that he could have started recovery as a teenager rather than in his 20's – could have saved the United States government and the state of Connecticut a lot of money as well. And the trend lines beyond the anecdotes are really disturbing.

Mental illness has been on the rise for the past few decades. One of five adults today are coping with mental illness. And if you look at the time period from 1987 to 2007, the number of people with mental disorders that qualify for SSI or SSDI have risen by two and a half times. From 1980 to 2000, we put up to 72,000 people in our jails who, prior to de-institutionalization would have been in psychiatric hospitals – people who are in jail primarily or only because of their psychiatric disorder. Just in the last two years alone – just in two years – the number of people that HRSA estimates to be living in a mental health shortage area has gone from 91 million, which is pretty bad to start with, up to 97 million. That's just two years' worth of data. And since 2005, we've closed 14% of our inpatient beds in this country. So what's happening is a dramatic increase in the number of people who are suffering from mental illness and a rather dramatic decrease in both the outpatient and in-patient capacity.

We've got to provide more resources to meet the demand but we also have to spend money better. So Senator Cassidy covered our piece of legislation, I think, aptly, and so I won't go into detail. So let me talk a little bit about our process. What we decided to do at the beginning of this year was bring together all of the groups – the provider groups, the advocacy groups, the hospital groups – that have worked on this issue for years. And then bring in those in the House of Representatives that have been working on this as well.

Representatives Tim Murphy and Eddie Johnson – they have a bipartisan reform bill in the House and so we decided not to start from scratch, but to take their piece of legislation, knowing it has a good chance of passage in the House, and try to build and improve upon it. And so we spent six months meeting with all of these groups and coming up with our own consensus product that, today, has the support of a cross-section of behavioral advocacy groups all across the country, including NAMI, the National Council for Behavioral Health, the American Psychological Association, Psychiatric Association, Social Workers, the Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the list goes on.

But we also went out to our colleagues as well – knowing nothing here can pass without just bipartisan support, but bipartisan support that reflects the diversity of both of our caucuses – and we were able to build, we think, a good foundation of cosponsors for this bill. Senators Franken, Stabenow, Blumenthal, and Schumer on the Democratic side. Senators Murkowski, Collins, Vitter, and Capito on the Republican side. And we hope that this coalition of groups on the outside, this alliance with a reform effort in the House that we believe has legislative legs, and a good one-for-one list of cosponsors here in the Senate will allow us to move this bill forward. And we have to. We have to.

And so I’ll end where Senator Cassidy began his remarks, which is why the nation's attention has turned to this question of how we reform our mental health system. We lived through a tragic and gut-wrenching episode of mass destruction in Newtown, Connecticut. Senator Cassidy has had his own experience with mass tragedy. And the reality is that the reasons why we see these episodes of mass shootings are complicated. But if you read the report on Adam Lanza's intersection with Connecticut's mental health system, you see that it failed him. It failed him and it failed his family. Now I don't know that correcting the mental health system alone would have changed what happened in Newtown, but I know that if we fix our mental health system, we will have a downward pressure on the episodes of mass violence that happen in this country.

But as Senator Cassidy said, we should fix our mental health system because it's broken for everyone, regardless of whether an individual has a predisposition towards violence. Because of course the reality is people with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence than they are the perpetrators of violence – there is no inherent connection between mental illness and violence. But these mass shootings have drawn the nation's attention to what Congress can agree on right now that will try to improve public safety across this nation.

We are not going to get a background checks bill this year. I hope we could, but we won't. What we can get is a mental health reform bill. And that will help everyone – the case in Maine, the individual in Bloomfield, and millions of others who have had a miserable experience with a mental health system that is broken today in part because of lack of coordination, in part because of a lack of funding.

I'm so thankful to Senator Cassidy for being with me on the floor today. I'm grateful for his friendship and for his cooperation on bringing this truly bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act to the floor of this Senate. We recommend it to our colleagues. We look forward to the upcoming hearings in the HELP Committee that we both sit on. And we hope to be back here on the floor of the Senate as soon as possible to move forward on its passage through this body.

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you to my colleague, Senator Cassidy. I yield the floor.