Patrick J. Kennedy: “What we're trying to do is make the spirit of parity a practical reality.”

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

the largest mental health treatment facility in all of our districts is our county jail.

And until there is that same urgency towards enforcing, and until there is that same money backing up our words that these are really equal illnesses, we are really still in denial as a Nation.

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…