Dec 7, 2015 3 min read

Shortly after a disgruntled lunatic shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado and just before a couple who apparently imbibed deeply from the cup of radical Islam shot up a get-together of county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he would make mental health reform – specifically a bill being shepherded by U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, the Upper St. Clair Republican – a priority for 2016.

Ryan, Murphy and many of their GOP colleagues have argued that the way to reduce the number of mass shootings is to better treat clearly deranged individuals who try to purge their demons by randomly targeting their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, no small number of Democrats and other opponents counter that focusing on mental health is just a way to divert the conversation away from gun-control measures that would get weaponry that belongs on the battlefield out of the hands of the crazed and the violent.

It’s not an either/or proposition. We need commonsense laws that reduce the number of guns on our streets, and make it harder for people who could pose a danger to others to get them.

But we also need to refurbish our mental health system, not only to potentially root out potential mass killers, but to also more effectively treat individuals suffering from severe mental illness, even if they are not prone to violence.

Murphy’s bill, called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, would help accomplish that. Co-sponsored by Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, it would offer a much-needed overhaul of our sclerotic mental health system.

Among other things, the proposal would put an assistant secretary for mental health in charge of the federal government’s vast mental health bureaucracy, replacing the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. It would also inject a dose of practicality to patient privacy laws so family members and other caregivers of individuals with severe mental illness can have some idea of when appointments are scheduled and what medications are being prescribed.

Tele-psychiatry would be provided to remote areas where psychiatrists are in short supply as part of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, and it would bolster early intervention programs and make it easier for physicians and mental health professionals to harmonize treatment plans.

The misgivings of some House Democrats aside, Murphy’s bill has bipartisan support, as does a similar measure that’s been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut (and no relation to Murphy). The congressman believes the two bills could be easily reconciled if both make it through their respective chambers.

We hope they will.

For a large swatch of the 20th century, individuals with severe mental illness were routinely committed to state psychiatric hospitals, often irredeemably cruel places, where they were warehoused and forgotten.

In the decades since these hospitals were shut down in favor of treatment within communities, we’ve arguably swung too far in the other direction, with those suffering from severe mental illness often left to fend for themselves or go without treatment. In many ways, we have traded mental hospitals for jails or prisons, where some estimates have it that upward of 70 percent of inmates suffer from some form of mental illness.

This cannot – and should not – persist. The reforms proposed by Murphy offer a way forward.