Several key provisions of the bill have been modified since it was introduced in the last Congress. Previously, Rep. Murphy called for eliminating funds for patients-rights groups, saying they were aligned with the “antipsychiatry movement” that would go as far as advocating people with severe mental illness not take their prescribed medications. Instead, H.R. 2646 would restrict funds to groups that investigate patient abuse and neglect only, which Rep. Murphy said would prevent antipsychiatry activists and others from giving dangerous counsel to those who lack insight into their condition.
The new bill has bipartisan support among subcommittee members. “It’s different than we saw last Congress,” Lauren Alfred, policy director for the Kennedy Forum, said in an interview. “Last time it was more about reacting to crisis, this time it’s more about the future. The focus is on what will happen in primary care offices and across the system if comprehensive mental health care reform goes forward.”
Despite that support, there is some dissent.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), ranking member of the Energy & Commerce Committee, testified that he favors the language on workforce development and parity enforcement but is opposed to predicating community mental health block grant funding on the existence of state treatment standard and assisted outpatient treatment laws, which Rep. Murphy’s proposed legislation would do.
The bill also raised some alarm with references to antiabortion language. Subcommittee member Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) noted that H.R. 2646 would expand existing restrictions on the use of grant funds to pay for abortions by reauthorizing the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, a suicide prevention law. Rep. Murphy dismissed this claim in an interview, noting that to remove the antiabortion language would mean rewriting the existing suicide prevention law. “It’s existing law from a decade ago and we simply reference that whole bill,” he said. “We haven’t changed anything. There’s nothing partisan or sneaky about it.”
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*Correction, 6/22/2015: An earlier version of this article misstated Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman's name.