WASHINGTON — The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration came under fire Wednesday for not fulfilling its mandate to reduce substance abuse and mental illness and instead, funneling money to alternative treatment organizations, according to the head of a House oversight subcommittee.
“SAMHSA has not made the treatment of the seriously mentally ill a priority,” said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., chairman of the Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. “In fact, I’m afraid serious mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may not be a concern at all to SAMHSA.”
Murphy based his statement on the absence of the words “schizophrenia” or “bipolar” in SAMHSA’s 2011-2014 strategic plan, as well as the portion of the Center for Mental Health Services’ $1 billion budget that he said supports grants “rooted in unproven social theory and feel-good fads, rather than science.”
But SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde responded that the agency requires grant applicants to either use an evidence-based practice that SAMHSA has identified or suggest a new treatment method, which they must back up with research and proven best practices.
Hyde did admit, however, that SAMHSA employs just one psychiatrist on its staff of nearly 600 people — exacerbating Murphy’s point that SAMHSA’s policy decisions may lack a firm foundation in proven science or medical experience.
“We don’t employ a lot of psychologists, we’re not a direct provider of services,” Hyde said. She emphasized, however, that SAMHSA, which is part of the Department of Health and human Services, will add a new chief medical officer who is a former psychiatrist to its staff on June 3. Hyde also said that SAMHSA works with the National Institutes of Health to “take what they learn from research and use it in the efforts that we do.”
Murphy also criticized SAMHSA for funding groups at odds with their mission – specifically, patient advocacy groups like the Disability Rights Center of Maine, which suggests individuals suffering from severe mental illness and mental health disorders not take their medication — as well as those that simply believe that mental illness doesn’t exist.
“We fund lots of organizations that have missions, or who have opinions or values bases that may not necessarily agree with SAMHSA,” said Hyde. “What we fund are specific grants with specific purposes related to the mission of SAMHSA.”
One hearing witness, Joe Bruce, said the actions of a patient advocate from the Disability Rights Center of Maine directly affected the death of his wife Amy at the hands of his son Will, who had undergone treatment at the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine, for schizophrenia.
“With the help from federally funded patient rights advocates from the DRCM, Will was discharged early from Riverview without the benefit of any medication,” Bruce said. “On June 20, 2006, I returned home to find the body of my wife, Amy. Will, in a state of deep psychosis, had killed her with a hatchet.”
Bruce asserted that medical records indicate the DCRM patient advocate had “coached Will on how to answer the doctor’s questions so as to get Will the least treatment and the earliest release.”
Will was committed by a criminal court to Riverview, where he is being given a medication that works for him and “is doing extremely well,” the elder Bruce said.
“An unbearable aspect of Amy’s death is that my own tax dollars helped make it possible,” Bruce said. “If he had been on medication in 2006 and had been released from the hospital with a court ordered treatment plan … I think that he’d be living in a community somewhere, probably with a job, and life would be a lot different for the Bruce family.”