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Letters: Bill should help mentally ill

The New Orleans Advocate - 1/4/2017

On Dec. 27, Rebekah Allen wrote an article detailing the severe lack of services and resources available to those with mental illness. Across the country, access is being hampered by a shortage of mental health providers and too few beds for those with serious mental illness who need to be hospitalized. Patients too often cannot get the care they need, and too often, they have a long delay between diagnosis and treatment. Access delayed is access denied and without appropriate treatment options, prisons, jails and emergency rooms become our de facto mental health care facilities.

Recognizing the need to institute massive reforms to our broken mental health system, I teamed up with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., to introduce the Mental Health Reform Act. Thanks to the help of Sen Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, our legislation passed Congress and was signed into law as part of the 21st Century Cures Act in December.

This landmark piece of legislation will begin to fix our broken mental health system and provide the resources necessary to help those with mental illness become whole again. We incentivize states to create alternatives where patients may be seen and treated in supervised outpatient settings, as opposed to being incarcerated.

By providing incentives to build an adequate and skilled mental health workforce, we can expand access to mental health care and provide quick and effective diagnosis and treatment. Our goal is for that person who has their first psychotic episode when she is 18, to be restored to wholeness so that when she is 50, she looks back upon that as a distant memory, but not as a life-defining event.

The legislation also promotes access to services through an integration of primary and behavioral care. Right now, people with serious mental illness tend to die from physical illness as much as 20 years younger than someone who does not have a serious mental illness.

Before our bill was passed, Medicaid, by policy would not pay for a patient to see two physicians on the same day. If a family practitioner sees a patient on Medicaid, who clearly has a serious mental illness, they would not be able to have them walk down the hall to see a physiatrist and have both their physical and mental illnesses treated at the same time. As a physician, I know if we treat the whole patient, if we integrate care, we see better outcomes.

This legislation does many important things to change how we treat mental illness in this country. By expanding access to mental health resources, clarifying the rules on disclosure of patient information with family caretakers and integrating primary and behavioral care, the 21st Century Cures Act will begin to fix our broken mental health system - preventing more people affected by mental illness from being denied the care they need.

The findings in the Department of Justice's report, detailed in Allen's article, are disheartening and must be addressed quickly. The passing of our mental health reform act will go a long way in providing Louisiana with the resources it needs to ensure that all of those affected by mental illness in our state have access to what they need to return to wholeness.

Bill Cassidy

U.S. senator

Baton Rouge