Tim Murphy's Fight for Mental Health Reform

Welcome to Why Not Me The World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me The World?
Humanity of a Handcuffed the Silent Crisis special event Today
would joined by Tim Murphy, a former American politician and
psychologists who represented Pennsylvania's eighteenth Congressional district in the US
House of Representatives from two thousand and three to twenty seventeen.
A lifelong advocate for mental health, Tim author the Helping
Families and Mental Health Crisis Act, a bill that passed
the House with an overwhelming four twenty two to two
vote in July twenty sixteen. With his wealth of expertise,
We're truly honored to have him here to share his
insights with us. Thanks for coming on.
Yeah sure sure.
You've served in both the state legislature and the House
of representatives, and throughout your career you've consistently supported mental
health initiatives and efforts to help people. What inspired you
to create the bills that you've worked on?
Great question. So, as a psychologist, I worked on issues
involving mental health for my whole life, even when I
was on the staff at Children's Hospital Pittsburgh and there,
go to Harrisburg and Capital and work on even awareness
among legislators, and what I kept finding I think they
wanted to do well, but they just didn't know what
to do. Everybody likes the idea of mental health quite frankly,
it can be kind of scary for a lot of folks,
and other folks aren't quite sure. And there's some folks
who just have a prejudice towards it. I'm not talking
about stigma. I made a prejudice towards it. Some people
think it's a weakness until they start really dignated to
it an understanding. There's a biological, neurological basis for much
of this.
As a state senator, how did your experience differ between
the State Senate and the House of Representatives, especially in
your goals of improving mental health?
What happened was I ran first state Senate in the
nineteen nineties. There worked a number of healthcare reforms, and
among them making sure that people could get access to
care and insurance were paid for it in a general sense.
In Congress, it was a much deeper dive the area.
Was chairman of a subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation in
the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Energy and Commerce
has jurisdiction over mental illness and health in general. But
in that what happened was right after through the terrible
shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the majority leader tasked
me with the idea, since we've got to do something
about this, and I know a lot of the human
cry was let's ban guns or let's restore guns. I
always knew it's not what was in their hand, it
was what's in their mind that was the big issue
in this. So we really had a year or two
of just investigation. We had many, many witnesses come forth,
dozens and dozens of parents, hundreds and hundreds of letters,
millions of social media hits telling us the problems that
were occurring. When it was on several levels, we did
not have enough train providers.
When you refer to train providers. Could you provide more
detail about what specific qualifications, expertise, or roles you have
in mind.
Now, I don't just mean counselors, I mean providers trained
to deal with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar,
and the more severe autism spectrum disorders. We had lots
of people who are going to deal with some of
the milder things, you know, the people with general angster
anxiety or our mild depression, but the more serious ones
we didn't have. The second thing is we had restrictions
in the law. Medicaid only pays for two weeks at
a time, fifteen days stay or a lifetime limit of
what one hundred ninety days in the hospital. That's a problem.
Or they didn't want to have more than sixteen beds
in a hospital. That's a problem. So it was these
artificial limitations on serious mental illness, particularly when you're dealing
with schizophrenia psychosis. Fifteen days is not enough. I mean,
it takes that much time to get off of one
medication and stabilize on another one. Your time is up
before you know it. And this one hundred ninety day
lifetime limit. I was second boy can you imagine if
we did that with cancer and said I'm sorry, we're
not going to give you any more days in this
There's other things with insurance companies more recently come to
light in that is that insurance companies have a tendency
when you start to get better, they stop payment. In
other words, as well, you don't really need this in
patient stay anymore because you're improving, so we're going to
stop payment for It's me before the person's even stabilized,
they're out on the street.
Yes, insurance is certainly a challenge, and releasing them back
onto the streets often does more harm than good. Are
you able to identify or develop any alternative solutions that
could better support these individuals.
Another aspect we discovered was that there's this concept of
this practical assistant outpatient treatment different from assertive community treatment.
The community treatment's one where basically services are provided. People
can talk to the person with severe mental illness with
the belief you can talk to them into getting care,
and that can work in a lot of cases. It
does not work when someone is so compromised with their
self awareness with a condition called annisubnosia, they don't even
know that they're not sick. They do not have that
self awareness. It's like the blind person who doesn't even
know what they're blind. Those are people who resist treatment,
who will become very paranoid about treatment, and of course
in the throes of their psychotic or schizophrenic crisis, they
can easily become paranoid because I think we're part of
the group that's spotting against them or trying to force
them into treatment.
What do you do in that case? They need help,
they don't want help, yet if they don't get help,
they never get better. Add to that, I think I've
heard there are groups that will there that support them
not getting the help.
Unfortunately, with that, there are groups called the disability rights groups,
which in concept make a lot of sense. They say
they don't want to force anybody into treatment with their consent.
I get that. And there was a time fifty years ago,
one hundred years ago when many people were just put
into these asylums. You thought, granting with a lot of control,
Uncle Bob, with a lot of control the sun, you
send them to these asylums. The asylums, by the way,
were set up originally to keep people out of homeless
and from prisons. It'd be a more humane place to
put people. So they start off with a good concept,
but they became overpopulated, understaffed dumby grounds. So the disability
rights people said, hey, you can't just be putting people there.
I get it. What happened is they went too far,
far far, far, too far, and assumed everybody was the same.
That in itself is such a far fest concept. In medicine,
it's like, we give everybody the same medicine. In medical
you go see the doctor, take two estmands, call me
in the morning. That's about where we are. And some
people you can talk into getting care, but some people
you simply cannot. And they keep it together long enough,
quite frankly to TV and say I'm fine, I'm not
going to kill myself, I'm not going to harm myself.
I'm really good because they know that they conceptualize, at
least if they're paranoid that something's wrong with you, then
you're trying to talk them into this care and they
don't want it. And they've also probably had a lot
of bad experiences anyways where they the police have been
called and they're afraid of those things. So what happens
is the disability rights groups posed a lot of these
things where we're trying to have assisted out patted, where
the judge could order using what's basically the black robe effects,
say you know you need to get care. It's compassionate,
but it's sure is different from the police grabbing the
person hand com for them and taking the jail. They
get to fight with the prison guard, they're given another penalty,
they get in a fight with somebody else to give another penalty,
fight with somebody else. Before you know it, they're as
solitary confinement. The worst possible thing you could do it
in jail with someone there. Jail is not a place
to treat schizophrenia. It never was. And eight out of
ten people in the jails get no treatment with that.
So and what is about forty percent of people in
prison have a serious mental illness and about ninety percent of
something and among the homeless, the numbers are similar.
To Given that there are numerous hospitals distributed across the country,
are there enough facilities with adequate resources to effectively support
those in need? How does the availability in the capacity
in these hospitals influence the broader situation, particularly in terms
of accessibility, quality, of care and overall outcome.
So what has happened in America is as we close
these hospitals down from five hundred and fifty thousand nineteen
fifties to about thirty eight thousand today, we provided nothing
else for them in terms of heavy enough hospital bids,
in terms of assistant our pictian treatment. There's people who
are pose saying having a judge say you no, you've
got to go in the hospital, you got to send
your medication, and we still have a shortage. And we
also have people who just do not engage families. Hippo
laws are extremely important to protect someone, but they have
gone too far in the sense that doctors are tied
up and not being able to communicate with families when
they know what's going on. I'll give you an example.
Let's say a young woman, maybe in early twenties, there's
a suicide threat. She's taken in the hospital. Do in
the morning, did they ever to tell the doctors, look,
I'm not going to kill myself. Really, I was just
kidding about that. And the doctor's thinking, well, we don't
have bed, we don't have a place to put, we
don't have a psych word. What are we going to do.
We'll trust you to go on the street and say, will
we call someone help you out? And if she says,
don't call my parents because I don't get along with them,
then that's it. They literally open the hospital doors and
say go along, find a ride home, do something. But
what if the doctors know the family. Whether the doctors say, Mary,
I know your folks, come on, we're all in the
same community. Let me call them, they'll get your ride. Well,
under hippolaws, you can't do that, and also unto hippo laws,
when you know someone is in the thrones of deep
psychosis and they're in crisis and they're fighting and they
don't want help, if the doctors could call the family
and say, we need some background history on this. Can
you give us more background and find out, oh, this
person said multiple times before the prescribe this medication, they
don't want to take it. Whatever else goes with that,
it's important to be able to have that information.
To access to that kind of information could enhance a
physician's ability to provide effective care. Are there any exceptions
or methods to circumvent those restrictive guidelines, or are the
medical professionals bound to adhere to them in all circumstance answers.
Well, that also is something that runs into barrier and
a lot of doctors operate at this ideas as well.
The confidentiality is sacricct I won't do that, you know what,
But they don't always do that. For example, if someone
has Alzheimer's and is wandering the streets in the snow,
it's two in the morning, and Grandma's out there in
their bare feet, they don't say let's let her go
because she doesn't want to be picked up and she
thinks she's on her way to second grade. They say,
let's call the family, let's take care of this. Well,
quite frankly, that is a personal nanasugnos. Yeah, and someone
else who we ought to put in the same category
of many people with schizophrenia in a crisis, they say,
we need to get this person help. It's not against
their will because they don't have a free, informed will.
So where does all this go? When I was doing
my investigations in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, we finally introduced
a bill to do several things. Make some tweaks to
hippo laws allow what we call compassionate communication lift the
sixteen bed rule, expand the number of days someone could
get care fund assisted out patient treatment, and push states
to do more of that.
Those sound like really great ideas. Is there anything else
that you could add to it or that you did
add to it.
We also wanted samsa subs use of Mental Health Service
Administration to focus, to shift his focus to look at
serious mental illness and mental illness and not just mental health.
Quite frankly, it was pretty goofy before Tony. It was
funding pictures and artwork and how to make a fruit
smoothie and sing songs and have yoga classes. You know what,
all that's good for mental health. It's great to people
eat right and sleep right and get involved in social activities.
That's not a treatment for mental illness. And again I
go back to my cancer metaphor. Can you imagine if
someone was checking into a major cancer clinic, they're going
too slowan category and they say, well, can I have chemotherapy?
And this this is no, no, no no. We're gonna have
yoga class in the morning, and then we're gonna teach
how to make a fruit smoothie. Then we be able
to do finger painting and send you home. This is
how absurd the system is, and that's because people within SAMSA,
quite frankly, don't know what they're doing. Samsa's leadership has
been weak, ineffective. Some years, it has had a lawyer
in charge. In the last couple of terms there's been
psychiatrist in charge. But in the last four years it
has gone back to mental health and not to work
as serious mental illness. And so what we've ended up
with is massive increases in homelessness, massive increases incarceration, more homicides.
As you know, ten percent of homicides are admitted by
someone with schizophrenia, even though schizophrena is one percent of
the population, and thirty percent of mass murders are some
with uncontrolled schizophrenia. Sometimes people will use this phrase and say, well,
a person with schizophrenia is no more likely to murder
someone than some without, and that's totally false. That study
was done comparing people with schizophrenia in treatment and people
who donia's schizophrenia, and so among those groups that's pretty similar.
But when you have someone without treatment, without care, without
wrap around services, without their medication, they can deteriorate and
become violent. Not only in the streets to their family,
but also a jail or somewhere else.
Earlier, you mentioned homelessness and how that overlapped with mental
health and schizophrenia. Can you expand on that sum.
What also is occurring in terms of the homeless area,
in terms of the number of almosts that have increased
dramatically in this country. We've had a system that has
been strained far beyond its capacity. Is already beyond strains
when you have several million immigrants come to this country
and they have no place to go, so they've shoved
people out of homeless shelters and put the immigrants in there,
which puts a homeless on the street again. The last year,
in twenty twenty four, HUD just released information from a
January assessment done January twenty twenty four, but they didn't
release until Christmas Week the Friday after Christmas in December
of twenty twenty four, that homelessess actually grew about eighteen
percent in the United States. Absurd that they waited twelve
months to get that. Cool that they waited twelve months
to do that proo because Congress can't do anything without data.
But then they say things like, oh, look, someone is
someone's getting better, they've got Some cities have reduced homelessness,
and that's silly because what happens is they reduce homelessess
by helping those who can easily adapt to help. Like
some people just don't have an apartment, or they don't
have the money or they miss payments. All right, we'll
get them into temporary housing and they'll move towards getting
a job in permanent housing. But even if they reduce
homelessness in those towns by ten or twenty or thirty
four percent, well that's expected because that's the people who
are mentally much better, and some of them pretty okay,
and with some assistants they can do better. But it
doesn't address the chronically seriously mentally old people with major problems,
and so that gets ignored.
Do they have any assisted housing or anything that can
help the homeless that might have some mental illness happening
to get them off the streets.
There's something pretty cool. CAD's come an assisted housing where
it's not a huge apartment building. Maybe there's only thirty
units or something like that, but there's a nurse at
the front desk, so as you're coming and down on
she just checks Hey, Bob, you get your medication. Rebecca
you get you take your pills today, and make sure
you get appointment today. That little check up For some
people who can function with that is great. But the
ones who have more serious problems, it just checking up
on the mizzon enough. In fact, parents will tell you
when they check up on it may end up in
a violent or heated altercation. So when I put my
legislation in, as I said, it was to make some
of those changes. Also to create the position of the
Assistant Secretary of Mental Health. I wanted to elevate the
issue and have someone in there could do the And
also we wanted something called ISTHMIK, which was the Inter
Departmental Serious Mental Illness Committee and Coordinated Committee, And that
was to take all these federal agencies from HUD and
AHHS and everywhere else and say you have to coordinate
your services, make sure we're evaluating on a government wide
level exactly what's going on.
That seems like it was a real good program. What
came from that, Here's.
Where a major prom broke down. The reason we did
that is because, as it turns out, when we asked
the General Accounting Office, so we wanted a survey of
the federal programs. They said, we really don't know what
we spend in this country. What said it maybe over
one hundred billion scatter, over one hundred and dirty programs.
We don't know. We just wrote letters to departments. They
threw a number at us, But we don't know if
it really treats mental illness, or if it does any good,
or what's going on. So that's a pretty amazing amount
of money that no one bothers to track, and we
wanted sam So to track it. They don't. They don't.
There's abstoually no data to say that. In fact, their
last report, which I think was in March of twenty
twenty four, they spent a few days talking about their
colorful logo. They came with the logo, the symbolism, all
of those colors. But I didn't tell you success stories.
And here's how we have worked innovative programs throughout the
federal government. Got these programs to work together. It's not there.
It's an abject failure. It's an embarrassment of the government.
And because that more people are dying, more people are
almost more people are in prison. So try to put
these factors in to get accountability there, try to put
factors in to get assist to OUTPITSI treatment and more
treatment options, and it has just ended up rather disastrous
for people with mental illness and their family.
That's sad to hear. So in your opinion, what needs
to change and how can we help these people that
need the help.
I'm hoping that President Trump and RFK appoint someone who's
a fighter who will go in there and clean this
mess up. This isn't any more time for goofball ideas,
no more time for single longs pats on the back.
This is people. We need to have someone in there
with like a psychiatrist, psychologist who understand serious mental illness
and understands these problems, wants to innovate and renovate programs there.
We have to do things at work, and we have
to track. No one is tracking the billions and billions
of dollars spread out of the around the country, one
hundreds of billions of dollars that end up dealing with
serious mental illness. And that's just not Medicare and Medicaid.
It's the Veterans Affairs, it's Department of Justice. Does all
these things take place. As a matter of fact, I'm
on the board of an organization called Schizophrenia and Psychosis
Action Alliance SMPA eight, and we did a study three
years ago. Another one we have that's going to come
out in another couple of months. We're tracking the expenses
justice schizophrenia again about one percent of the population, and
there we look at direct medical costs, direct treatment costs,
criminal justice costs, family costs, unemployment costs, costs of not
being the workforce, and disability costs, whole host of things.
And just for schizophrenia, our best estimate of the costs
for her twenty twenty four is about three hundred and
eighty billion dollars during eighty billion for one disease entity.
That is indeed a ton of money. I guess my
next question is is it working and helping the ones
that need the help?
Now, that is pretty remarkable, that amount of money, and
you think that would shake up the federal government to
say where does it go? Is it doing any good? Well,
the money is spent, and governors and mayors will say, well,
we're spending money. We have these programs, we have social
workers out there, and the question should be are people
getting better are you tracking them, You track the individuals,
or you just tell us how much money you spent
and the answers they tell you how much money they spent,
and they'll give you some general number. But every time
there's a mass murder or some other crime committed by someone,
you can pretty much bet if it's a person bend
to illness, they or not in treatment. Case in point
a couple months ago, the event took place in the
New York subway where the man ended up who was
in crisis, ended up being restrained in a chokeol platformer
Marine Daniel Penny, So everybody got on Penny and said
that he was terrible, cruel and racist. Went to trial
for manslaughter. He was acquitted. The sad thing as the
victim in this case wasn't just a homeless street performer
that the media tried to portray it, as he was
a man with severe mental and his schizophrenia and he
wasn't taking his treatment. There was another case around the
same time a man who went through New York with
a knife and killed three people stabbed him and they
called him homeless. Well, he was homeless, but he was
also a man of schizophrenia. There wasn't in treatment. These
are terribly sad stories that are taking place. When I
was in Congress, I tried to wake people up to
understand and say, many of these cases are treatable, preventable.
But you got to have someone be grown up in
the room to say these are folks who need to
get them help. Don't just say well, if they don't
want to help, we're going to leave it at that.
We wouldn't do that with a child. He doesn't want
to go to school, let's not let him go to school. Well,
some parents might, but he you know, he's pretending. He's
say let's let him stay home. But we have to
understand these are lives worth saving and they can be
saved if we treat them. It's a massive burden on parents.
Their hearts break every day. Across the nation. Some groups
like Mad Moms of Arizona and there's one in Colorado too,
or Fighting Back. I love this.
I have them coming on a little later this month.
You're right, they're great.
They're dynamic, wonderful women out there, get in there and
kick butt, take no prisoners. By what they do is
they teach the legislators. Here's what is really happening, and
they're people of passion and information, and so the legislators thought, well,
I was told that we could just talk them into care. No,
they won't do that. So it's informing them. And I
hope any family member, any parent who's out there and things,
why aren't things changing? Well, my point is you got
to talk through your US congressman, your state senator, to
your state representative and tell them what's going on. Why
because they don't understand. It's not a fault, they just
don't know. Nobody can know everything. And people say, well,
they got to read my letter. Well, I'll tell you
they never read the letter you don't write. They never
answer the call you don't make, and so it is
important you'll let them know.
Absolutely, reach out to them. What are some of the
things you hope they do?
We have more things to do. I believe that. I
hope we get a strong assistant sector of mental health.
Wish I could talk to someone about that, but I
hope we do. And I hope we also lift the
IMD exclusion the BED. I hope we lift the limit
a number of days. I hope we change some of
the hippolaws allow doctors to get more accurate history and
help the person up on discharge. I hope that we
can have accountability for the states of how much money
they spend, where they spend it, and is it effective,
and publish that information, make it public so that states
know and taxpayers know where it is going. I want
to know what's taking place in prison, what is done
with people who are in prison and for crimes associated
with or maybe unrelated to mental illness, What money is
being spent, what treatment is being provided, what's the outcome?
Same with the homeless population. So if all these things
we don't have data on, the federal government and state
governments are flying totally blind here. It is a sham.
It is cruel and as a nation, we shouldn't be
putting up with this. We wouldn't put up with that
anywhere else. But with sometimes you think, well, those are
mentally illing. A gun named Ron Powers wrote a book
It's called No One Cares About Crazy People, because that's
the attitude amongst people in leadership positions. Nobody cares. Well,
we need to care, we need to say this must
be done, we have to handle this. So that's why
I'm continuing to fight on these things. That's why I'm
going to continue to work on these things. That's why
I hope we can make things happen. And that's the story.
So if you had the job where you is overseeing
this whole thing that's going on, what would you do
to make it smoother? Mental health has such a wide
umbrella and a lot of these organizations, for lack of
a better term, they just don't play well together. How
can we get these organizations which aren't coordinating well to
come together with our legislators under a wide enough umbrella,
creating a unified force they can't ignore, rather than going
it alone. So this whole effort flows more smoothly.
And that's a great question. You know, the answer is
not everybody's under the same umbrella, multiple umbrellas. So for example,
now I mean a national alliance or mental illness and
one time was really focused on serious mental illness. Now
it's all over the place. And when it's too broad
and all over the place, it's trying to please so
many people that it can't please anybody at all. And
it goes where the money is, and it goes towards
government and companies will give money towards mental illness it's
a great sounding organization by name. They have to have
the accountability. Are you making a difference with serious mental illness?
So now ME has this place in terms of information
and talking about stigma, but it's not pushing for innovation
within an accountability within serious mental illness. Mental Health America
great organization. They work on issues to make sure people
with a serious mental owners can get care. But they're
opposed to assisted out patient treatment. I agree with them
for those who can with serve community treatment and help
them and guide them along. And those people are cooperative. Awesome,
that's a very important pool. But not everybody is the same.
And the disability rights organizations say everybody's the same, diagnose
the same treatment plan. We have to stand up and
say no, that's not right. So Samson needs leadership. The
assistant sector needs to lead and say I get what
you're concerned about, but what you're concerned about does not
apply to everyone. Everything else that takes place. When your
only tools I hammer, everything looks like a nail and
I tell people, well, gee, if you have a problem
in your house with I don't pick anything a broken
light bulb. You don't send the road crew in to
pave your driveway. That's not the same. You wouldn't do that.
You have to work very refined on that. And in
the field of medicine, we don't treat every diagnosis the same,
and with mental illness we should not treat every diagnosis
the same, and the subcategories of diagnosis based upon the symptoms.
A lot of what I do now, for example, I
work with people with very serious post traumatic stress disorder,
which can have very very major consequences from moments severe depression,
severe anxiety, debilitating levels of that, psychotic behaviors from massive stress.
But you don't treat them all the same. And what
we can do is help a lot of people with PTA.
So too it is with psychosis. We can help a
lot of people. But it's going to take a leader
within SAMSA, that assistant secretary come in and say, no,
we're not doing everybody the same way. And two, we're
going to stop the goofy programs, absolutely stop them. There's
no more room for grants for yoga classes or for
art classes or anything like that. You want to do that,
go somewhere locally for that. Go to your local community
center and get people some art classes. It's valuable, but
it's not mental illness treatment, and say the money we have,
the very limited money we have, we're going to spend
on these things. For example, I think this year's cyclic grants,
I think it's something like fifteen to twenty million nationwide
for EOT you kidding meet A couple of counties could
eat it up. In Pennsylvania, they passed the law on
twenty eighteen that said the gay counties where with all
it and permission to do AOT. One county is doing
it so far and not very much. Major counties like
Philadelphia and Alleghania they're not doing it. So it is
this level that the Assistant Secretary has to hold states accountable.
Say what are you doing? I would say, say we
need more money. It says, tell me what you're doing.
We want to see your plan of action and give
evidence that what you're doing makes sense. Give us some
accountability numbers, and don't just tell us it's approving by
a percenter point. That's in general what has to happen.
But it really is going to take someone the way
I word this, it has to be the tenacity of
Teddy Roosevelt and the compassion of mother Teresa to combine
those two, neither one of them would take no for
an answer, neither one, and both of them improve the world.
Yeah, I think you're right there for sure. I spoke
with a lady the other day from Alleghany County about
making some changes, and we went through the whole process.
It was almost like some of the things you just mentioned. Yeah,
So I'm wondering should this start at the federal level
or the local level. So many people aren't sure where
to begin to push for this change.
Well, one has to assess what your area has. If
your county is not putting in for example, EOT, it
is important that people become a very strong voice appealing
to their county government and accountability. And that is not
just a private meeting. That means showing up to your
county meetings, in your local community meetings and city meetings
and say here's a problem, take care of this, and
I'll guarantee you at some point there'll be some crisis
that occurs that these same parents go and say this murder,
this assault, this suicide took place because we don't have
the program. The bloods in your hands. Now, that's strong words,
but having been in politics for a while you need
strong words. I would suggest that people look at the
bad Moms model out in Arizona and find out the
same thing. But definitely do that, and yes, appeal on
the federal government, because the federal government's going to pay
with Medicare and Medicaid and other grants. So let your
congressmen know and understand they may not know what you're
talking about. Please don't know. Down them and say, well,
we told them they're not doing anything. You have to
make a very specific gass. So you can't say we
want you to do more for mental health and the
person will say, thank you very much, I agree with you.
Let's do more for mental health. And one day that
member of Congress say, hey, do we have any mental
health bills I can vote on? Well, that's not good enough.
You want to say, I need you to specifically do
this accountability within Samson, emphasize serious mental onus. Drop the
sixteen bedrule, drop the fifteen day one time admission, drop
them one ninety day lifetime admission, change the hip for laws,
put some money into aot. You have to punch and
punch and punch in those ways, and all this with
that massive accountability, just all the time you ask a
member of Congress where does the money go? I think
now that Elon Musk is in there with this whole
Doge principle making government accountability, that could be a real
plus here. Don't cut the money out of Elon, but
please have it in such a way that people are
that the government is asking what did you do with
the money we gave you? What did you do with it?
And if that area says well we don't know, well
then you don't get anymore. Well then we will have
a problem. Then you've got a problem, and we're going
to publish that information and say you're wasting your money
and you're causing cruel problems. That's boldness. But it's going
to need that kind of boldness for us to do.
I mean, it's just like in the Penandon. If we
have generals that are not preparing our military for protecting
our nation, it has to be exposed all the way
down the line. So and these are lives of people
with mental illness, so we need to push it there too.
So in closing, what's one key thing you think the
listeners need to hear about what they should be doing
to make things better for all families.
Speak up, Do not be silent. Silence doesn't work. It's
not a means of getting action in there. And in that,
please let your legislator know what your concerns are, what
your personal concerns are, Tell them your story, tell them
what you want them to do. Some of the articles
I published at my website, which is doctor Tim Murphy
dot com. That's Dr Tim mu r Phy dot com,
Doctor Tim Murphy dot com. I suggest people go there.
They can read some of these articles because it does
have some plans of action in there. But don't give up. Please,
don't ever give up. I've been fighting this for years
and I know it gets very, very frustrating, very frustrating.
We have a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of
painful stories to swap with each other. But we can
give up, and sometimes when the only people we have
with each other holding us up. That's what it is.
But there's a great saying. It says, you never know
how strong you are until being strong is the only
choice you have. And that's what we have here. We
don't have any other choices. Have to be strong, to
speak up, to be persistent, not to be mean, but
to certainly be assertive in this and say we want
to help Congress and state legislators understand this, but please,
you gotta do this. Lives are at stake, Families are
at stake. It's not just the law, but it really
is quite forget that. Even the Bible says, you know
that when you don't visit someone in prison, when you
don't feed the hungry, when you walk by the homeless,
that's sinful to We've got to be working on all
these things on every level and never ever give up.
Yes, absolutely, this has been great, great information, great conversation.
I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.
Well Tony great. I hope we get to work together again.
Yes, me too. Thanks again, thanks for taking the time
out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
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