Patrick J. Kennedy

There are hundreds of thousands of my fellows in America who are dying because their medical system does not know they have an underlying addiction because it doesn't show in the EMR that they have been treated for addiction.

Because I think any firefighter will tell you, these days especially, they spend more of their time trying to do first response to overdoses and mental health crisis than they do putting out fires.

I think, obviously, when you look at the fact that so many of our jails are filled with people with mental illnesses and addictions, that clearly a better response than occupying police time would be to make sure that proper first…

We have got to address the stigma, and we have got to put the resources behind these efforts.

We need help from Congress to remove prejudice and discrimination and treat it just like all other forms of prejudice and discrimination.

So if I were both a liberal or a conservative, parity would be a big issue for me.

The process to seek help should not be a barrier to receiving help.

We have made progress in normalizing conversations and reducing stigma about mental illness, it is clear, it is so clear

It is prejudice and discrimination to think that if a person has a mental illness, they are not capable of functioning.

And really, in essence, this is corporate welfare of the first order. We are allowing the richest companies in our country, the healthcare insurance companies, who, by the way, are sitting on a boatload of cash because they have never had…

We can't even get $20 million to even--and by the way, for my Republican friends, enforcing parity means making sure that insurance companies don't give the Heisman to mental health and addiction such that our taxpayers have to pay the…

The promise of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act has not been realized and that many Americans are encountering barriers when seeking professional help.