Patrick J. Kennedy: “we are in denial as a Nation about mental health.”

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.

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

What we're trying to do is make the spirit of parity a practical reality.

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.