Patrick J. Kennedy: “But our current assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that in fact what this began as was…”

When we have an emergency, FEMA comes in. They've got housing, job opportunities, support of this and that. We need a strategy that understands that housing is critical to address the homeless epidemic of people with severe mental illness…

If this were any other issue we would move heaven and Earth to deal with it. In COVID we responded right away, everybody inoculation, everybody out there. The longest impact of COVID is going to be mental health, and yet, we don't treat it.

Denial is the big issue here. And we all know growing up in families where there is alcoholism and addiction or mental illness that we don't like to talk about these things.

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.