Mental Health & Addiction
I have made it my mission in the Senate to improve our nation’s broken mental health system. America's mental health system has been neglected for too long and is in desperate need of reform. Too many children and adults with mental health needs in our country do not get the timely, high quality care they need to live healthy and productive lives.
I worked for a year with conservative Republican Senator Bill Cassidy to draft and introduce the bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act. I held over a dozen roundtables across the state with mental health consumers and providers to make sure that Connecticut’s priorities were reflected in the bill, and now our legislation is the leading effort in the Senate to fix our nation’s broken system.
The Mental Health Reform Act would require insurers to drop all the red tape and bureaucratic hurdles they put in front of families who want to access their mental health benefits. It would promote integration of the physical and primary health systems with the behavioral health system, so that families can get care that is coordinated and centralized. The bill would put more resources into early intervention so that caregivers pick up the first signs of mental illness in kids and young adults and the illness never reaches a crisis stage. And the legislation would reform the federal agency that funds mental illness so that more of their money goes to truly proven interventions rather than feel-good programs with little chance of success.
When it comes to addiction, we can no longer afford to ignore the crisis that is in our midst – the dramatic increases in heroin and prescription drug addiction in our state. Overdose deaths are climbing every year, and I am fighting in Congress to send emergency funding to Connecticut to deal with this epidemic. We need more money for crisis intervention, long term treatment, medication therapy, and law enforcement. We also need to crack down on the drug companies and physicians who push pain killers that aren’t necessary and often lead to addiction. That’s why I'm working to reign in drug companies making huge profits off of prescription pain medications.
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