families and mental health crisis act to try and reform how we deal with mental health in our country. congressman, welcome. we ve long been an out spoken advocate for mental health. what are we doing wrong and what should we do? i outlined some of this on friday. and basically our mental health system in america despite having good programs is something of a disgrace. i believe it s anti patient, anti family and anti medicine and anti science. we have 112 agencies and the key agency supposed to be dealing with this takes an approach that is against what we should be doing and thinking more behavior wellness instead of severe mental illness as kin to saying we ll pay attention to early signs of cancer but won t really treat severe cancer and where this leaves us in the area of mental illness or 10 or 12
so these provisions alone are reasons to really look at helping families in mental health crisis. it really gives our communities a chance to prevent tragedies like these, and again, like you said, brooke, every situation is unique. these are outliers on the vast majority of people in mental illness are not dangerous. but we so owe it to our children to make our communities safer. yes. for all children. i so appreciate you coming forward, sharing your very personal story. and just for folks to be able to read in congress, helping families in mental health crisis act, the one proposed by congressman tim murphy. liza long, thank you, thank you, as always, for coming on the show. thank you. coming up next, after months of waiting, this raw data from missing flight 370 is now pub c public. but families say something is still missing here.
delivery model. first of all, that we have to rely on the police, the first responders for mental health crisis. that s a huge burden on law enforcement. and sometimes they lack the training. i believe all law enforcement officers are heroes. but sometimes they don t have the training that they need to spot something like when they did that welfare check. and it s really not even fair that we ve chosen to treat mental illness through law enforcement, through prison when there are other options. so let s talk about that. in the blog, you talk about the two bills in congress to help, specifically i want you to tell us about helping families in mental health crisis act, presented by congressman tim murphy. what is that proposing in talking about narrowing the gap we talk about. i was one of the parjts who testified in a forum after newtown about what parents of mental illness need. we still did not have a diagnosis for my son after more than eight years. representatives murphy s bil
things may happen for a reason. you re holding hearing about a bill now that you say can fix this system that is hopelessly broken. 350,000 people who are mentally ill right now were housed in jails because there are only 35,000 beds available in the country as you well know. you can t hold people for more than 72 hours in most places without a hearing. you say you can fix these things. you have the helping families and mental health crisis act. it provides more training police so they don t enter the situation with someone mentally ill and get that person even more problems. we need to have more hospital beds. medicaid currently has a limit on that. when someone s in the middle of a crisis, they need a place to go. what happens now is they re brought into an emergency room.