Political Quotes

“for 25 years I have worked in the Louisiana public hospital system. You cannot help but notice when you work in a public hospital system, but also in private hospitals, how often mental health issues are directly a part of a patient who comes to see you. It does not just have to be a physician seeing patients in the emergency room. Each of our families, mine included, has a family member or a friend with serious mental illness. It is nonpartisan. It cuts across demographic lines. If I go before a group anywhere in my State, indeed anywhere in the Nation, and bring up the need to address serious mental illness, all heads nod yes. It is true of my family. It is true of yours. It is true of almost everybody watching today. I am old enough to remember when people would not speak of cancer. There was a stigma associated with having cancer. That is long gone, much to our advantage, but for some reason, there continues to be a stigma, a shame, associated with mental illness. I will argue that stigma and sense of shame has retarded what we can do. This is something that we have to address, we have to discuss, and we have to go forward. The discussion right now, frankly, is being driven by tragedy: Lafayette, Louisiana; Newtown; Charleston; Oregon; Tennessee.…”