Mental Health Issue

It was not too long ago that society considered many mental illnesses untreatable. However, over the years, a strong commitment to addressing mental health issues has led to landmark breakthroughs in our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illnesses. During his years in the Senate, Senator Domenici has taken an active leadership role with issues relating to mental illness like: mental health parity, increased funding for cutting edge mental health research, erasing the stigma surrounding mental illness, and increasing funding for those in prison or homeless suffering from a mental illness.

Mental Health Parity

Many insurance companies believe illnesses of the brain should receive less coverage than illnesses or injuries to the body. As such, Senator Domenici introduced the first ever Congressional legislation requiring insurance companies to provide parity between mental health benefits and medical and surgical benefits. The landmark "Mental Health Parity Act of 1996" passed Congress and was signed into law.

While this was a historic first step, more must be done and Senator Domenici is currently working to expand the 1996 law to provide full parity between all mental health benefits and medical and surgical benefits. Specifically, the "Senator Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act of 2003" seeks to prohibit a group health plan from imposing treatment limitations or financial requirements on mental health benefits unless comparable limitations are imposed on medical and surgical benefits.

MIND Institute

Cutting edge research is critical to obtaining a better understanding of mental illnesses and Senator Domenici could not be more pleased with New Mexico's own Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND) Institute headquartered in Albuquerque. MIND is a collaboration of three national centers of excellence in functional brain imaging, each with proven capabilities in state-of-the-art imaging technologies. The centers combine strengths of the organizations, including: New Mexico—UNM, the VA Medical Center, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories; Massachusetts—Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; and, Minnesota—Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Medical Center and the University of Minnesota's Center for Magnetic Resonance Research.

PATH Grants

Unfortunately, many of America's homeless also suffer from a serious mental illness. Senator Domenici is proud to have taken a small, but important, step to address this problem by authoring legislation that created the highly successful Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) Program. The PATH program provides community support services to individuals with a severe mental illness, who also are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Just this year, Congress provided the program with about $45 million in funding to continue assisting those who are homeless and suffering from a mental illness.

For more information about the Mental Health Parity Act, please visit:
http://www.cms.gov/hipaa/hipaa1/content/mhpa.asp

For more information on the MIND Institute, please visit:
http://www.themindinstitute.org/cgi-bin/output.pl?task=home

For more information on PATH Grants, please visit:
http://pathprogram.samhsa.gov/

For more information on Senator Domenici's views and activities on mental health, visit our online News Center.

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