Why the Bizarre Attempt to Poison John Boehner Shows the Need for Rep. Tim Murphy’s Mental-Health Reform

The bizarre plot to kill Speaker John Boehner, if true, is more than a cause for alarm — there’s also something we can do about it. The plotter is alleged to have had previous psychiatric hospitalizations; he was off his medications; and he believed he was Jesus and that Boehner was responsible for the Ebola outbreak. 

Sad cases like this show the importance of passing the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act proposed by Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) when it is reintroduced in 2015.

Murphy’s bill would aim to connect the most seriously ill to treatment, including provisions that help states require some to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community.

If Hoyt was eligible, Murphy’s bill might have kept him healthy and avoided the plotting.

The legislation also contains provisions making it more likely that states will treat people with serious mental illness when they have a “need for treatment”; under current law, many states wait until after individuals with mental illness become “danger to self or others.” Rather than prevent violence, their laws require it.

Most important, the bill will force the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal government’s mental-health bureaucracy, to do what it has not done voluntarily: focus on reducing homelessness, violence, arrest, and incarceration of persons with serious mental illness, all of which have become a national crisis and been ignored by the agency.

This is not the first planned or actual attack on political leaders by persons with untreated serious mental illness. Remember:

• President Ronald Reagan was shot by mentally John Hinckley in an attempt to get a date with Jodie Foster.
• President James Garfield was killed by mentally ill Charles Guiteau.
• President Andrew Jackson was shot by mentally ill Richard Lawson.
• President Theodore Roosevelt was shot by a mentally ill man who said a ghost told him to attack.
• Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot by Jared Loughner, who has been ordered to receive treatment for mental illness.
• President John F. Kennedy escaped an planned assassination by mentally ill Richard Pavlick.
• Russel Weston shot two security officers at the U.S. Capital Building and was found incompetent to stand trial.
• John Patrick Bedell, who shot up the Pentagon, had a history of mental illness that led his parents to warn authorities about him.
• Numerous individuals with mental illness jumped the White House fence in 2014, including Omar Gonzalez, who made it inside.

Congress usually addresses these events by providing themselves with better security.

But what about the rest of us? Only by ensuring treatment for the most seriously ill can Congress help patients, keep everyone safer, and save money. Representative Murphy’s proposals do all three. 

— D. J. Jaffe is executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org., a non-partisan think-tank on serious mental illness.