Date: 2008-02-06
Speaker: TIM MURPHY (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Pennsylvania

Madam Speaker. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. Madam Speaker. one of the important points that we -need to recognize as we address these issues of mental health and mental illness today are the causes. For so often. as I described earlier. when people are thinking about .or talking about mental illness. we oftentimes do not understand that it really is a problem of brain functioning. Its written off too often as the worried well of people conplaining or malingering. when really we need to understand the following. When were talking about problems with heart disease. its easy to look upon tho se problems. to look at Xrays and other tests and MRIs and see if the function of the heart is appropriate. if the valves are working. if the arteries and veins are blocked or free. When we look at other illnesses throughout the body. there are so many tests which we have grown accustomed to. MRIs. CT scans. EKGs. et cetera. And we look at those things and were able to see that something is wrong based upon the results of those tests. One of the problems with mental illness. leading to the prejudices about mental illness. is that there are no tests like that. One cannot take an Xray of the brain and say that the person has depression or anxiety disorder or bipolar illness. There have been multiple studies looking at patterns that may show up on some tests. But my point is this: Just because we cannot see it on a medical test like that does not mean it does not exist. Back in the 1800s. Louis Pasteur described the microbes that finally led us to understand about germs and diseases. Before that. no one had any tests to look at that. It did not mean they didnt exist. That merely meant that we did not know that they were there. But it was a full century later before we found that one could treat diseases with antibiotics. and were still learning more about it. So. too. it is important we understand that so often when discussing these issues of mental illness treatment. people raise the question that you cannot really test for it. Now. those are areas that science and research are still needed to determine what we can do. but it does not mean they dont exist just because we cannot find those. Instead. what we rely on is the comments made by persons themselves or watching the behavior of persons because. indeed. those are the indicators that tell us something is wrong with the function of the human brain. It isa neurological problem. It is a neurobehavioral exhibition of those problems. It is those problems that we have to understand that sometimes are treated with medication and sometimes are treated with counseling and sometimes both. but we have to make sure we understand that we cannot write these off with treatments just by ignoring them or just saying that someone else without treatment because an insurance plan will coyer that is enough. Many times cardiologists will tell us that they recognize when they give someone a diagnosis that its terminal or severe. that many of those patients will themselves exhibit symptoms of depression. so they automatically write a prescription for an antidepressant drug. Thats not enough. The comments I made before about how. when a person has a chronic illness. their health care cost can double if they have untreated depression. that alone should wake us up to understand that we need to be treating mental illness. not ignoring it. That alone should wake up employers to understand that improved productivity and lowered health care costs should be enough to motivate us to do that. That alone should be information that the Congressional Budget Office. who scores these bills. should tell us that there are scores that are important in terms of savings. Unfortunately. they dont tell us scores for prevention. And so it goes on. These are things we need to be continuing to do. and thats why we will continue to support this bill. Madam Speaker. I reserve the balance of my time.