Mental Health Inc by Art Levine

Author:Art Levine [LEVINE, ART]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HEA000000, PSY036000, SOC029000
ISBN: 9781468315318
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-05-16T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

To Live and Die in LA: How DMH’s Outreach Work Saves Lives, Stops Mass Shootings

AS SEEN IN LA COUNTY AND ACROSS THE COUNTRY, IF LOCKING UP THE seriously mentally ill in jail doesn’t help them or the community, then undertaking a dragnet to hunt down potentially violent, disturbed people and forcing them to take their medications doesn’t hold much promise, either.

Yet a few hours after the May 2014 shooting rampage by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista near Santa Barbara that left seven people dead, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) seized the opportunity to draw new attention to his controversial mental health reform bill that had been stalled in Congress since 2013—in part because it emphasized forced, long-term medication and outpatient treatment. But in the wake of the Charleston church massacre in June 2015 and other tragedies, its chances looked brighter. More than a year later, mass shootings—defined as four or more people injured or killed—occurred at a rate of more than one a day, spurring a renewed interest in mental health reform. Over time, Rep. Murphy also softened the bill’s outpatient commitment provision to win broader support.

His advocacy template has been set since the Newtown tragedy in December 2012. As he has so often done in recent years, Rep. Murphy, Congress’s only trained psychologist, declared in the aftermath of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, “I am angered because once again, our mental health system has failed and more families have been destroyed because Washington hasn’t had the courage to fix it. How many more people must lose their lives before we take action on addressing cases of serious mental illness?” A year later, even before the killings in Charleston, South Carolina, galvanized the country, Murphy reintroduced a revised version of his legislation on the anniversary of the Newtown shooting and proclaimed, “If we want to prevent the next Newtown, Tucson, Aurora, Isla Vista, Columbine or Navy Yard we have to do something comprehensive and research-based and we have to do it now.”

In July 2016, after he worked to modify its most controversial elements, including mandated treatment, his sweeping mental health reform bill passed a near-unanimous vote in the House of Representatives before passing the Senate. Then it was signed into law in December as part of a broader legislative package that speeded up drug approvals by the FDA. Democrats dropped their earlier opposition to the bill for allegedly undermining patient rights. In earlier versions, it sought to use federal funds to punish or reward those states that implement involuntary Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) commitment programs; in the new version, the bill simply adds funding to some existing pilot AOT programs.

Murphy’s support for outpatient commitment, though, has never wavered. The nation’s mental health system, he told CNN, “is more interested in protecting people’s rights to be sick than their rights to be well,” arguing for greatly expanded mandated, long-term treatment for the seriously mentally ill as vital for reform.

Yet Los Angeles County, it turns out, has a solution that has stopped

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