Roy Blunt: “I want to talk today about a topic that I think is getting more attention now than it has gotten for some time--but…”

“I want to talk today about a topic that I think is getting more attention now than it has gotten for some time--but still not the attention it deserves--and that is to talk a little bit in May, which is Mental Health Month, about mental health. I was on the floor of the Senate the last day of October 2013, the 50th anniversary of the last bill that President Kennedy signed into law, which was the Community Mental Health Act. Through the Community Mental Health Act, you saw the facilities that were about to be closed, but the anticipated alternatives, in so many ways, never really developed. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately one in five adults experiences mental illness in a given year, and one in five young people between the ages of 13 and 18 will experience severe mental illness sometime during their lifetime. The National Institutes of Health says that one in four adult Americans has a diagnosable, and almost always treatable, mental health disorder, a mental behavioral health issue, and that one in nine adult Americans has behavioral health illness that impacts how they live every single day. So whether it is the statistic that relates to one in four or one in five or one in nine, this is an issue that affects the lives of lots of people. Half of the children in that age group, 13 to 18, rarely get the help they need, and even fewer adults do.…”