Our MO State Government at Work
We thought you should know that the Governor of Missouri just signed a new law into effect in the area of mental health care.
HB1064 (House Bill 1064) removes references to the phrases “mentally retarded” and “mental retardation” from statute and replaces them with “intellectually disabled” and “intellectual disability”, respectively.
Unfortunately they did not enact any budget cuts to the Department of Mental Health. In fact, they raised the DMH budget from $1.6 billion last year to $1.8 billion this year. But our Missouri legislators have made sure that they are politically correct about it.
Raise your hand if you would like the DMH to show positive results for their $1.8 billion.
By positive results, we mean outcomes that are important to the patient, the patient’s family, and the social and work environments of the patient. We do not mean outcomes that are important for maintaining the budget and status quo of psychiatrists, psychiatric institutions, or the Department of Mental Health.
An example of a positive result (what we might call an Ideal Scene) would be: patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.
People in desperate circumstances must be provided proper and effective medical care. Medical care, not psychiatric “care”, attention, good nutrition, a healthy, safe environment and activity that promotes confidence will do far more than the brutality of psychiatry’s drug treatments. Housing and work will do more for the homeless than the life-debilitating effects of psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric treatments that destroy responsibility.
Now is the time to visit, call, write, email and otherwise contact your federal, state and local officials and let them know that they must start insisting on actual positive outcomes in exchange for their mental health budgets. Or lose their budgets. Call them out to show their results. And we don’t mean meaningless statistics like the number of prescriptions written or the number of patients involuntarily committed, or the number of gun permits issued or revoked; we mean the number of patients who have recovered from their mental trauma and are now home as productive members of society.
Do it now, please. And let us know the responses you get.