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U.S. Code as of:
01/19/04
Section 9401. Congressional statement of findings
The Congress finds -
(1) despite the significant progress that has been made in
making community mental health services available and in
improving residential mental health facilities since the original
community mental health centers legislation was enacted in 1963,
unserved and underserved populations remain and there are certain
groups in the population, such as chronically mentally ill
individuals, children and youth, elderly individuals, racial and
ethnic minorities, women, poor persons, and persons in rural
areas, which often lack access to adequate private and public
mental health services and support services;
(2) the process of transferring or diverting chronically
mentally ill individuals from unwarranted or inappropriate
institutionalized settings to their home communities has
frequently not been accompanied by a process of providing those
individuals with the mental health and support services they need
in community-based settings;
(3) the shift in emphasis from institutional care to
community-based care has not always been accompanied by a process
of affording training, retraining, and job placement for
employees affected by institutional closure and conversion;
(4) the delivery of mental health and support services is
typically uncoordinated within and among local, State, and
Federal entities;
(5) mentally ill persons are often inadequately served by (A)
programs of the Department of Health and Human Services such as
medicare, medicaid, supplemental security income, and social
services, and (B) programs of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, the Department of Labor, and other Federal agencies;
(6) health care systems often lack general health care
personnel with adequate mental health care training and often
lack mental health care personnel and consequently many
individuals with some level of mental disorder do not receive
appropriate mental health care;
(7) present knowledge of methods to prevent mental illness
through discovery and elimination of its causes and through early
detection and treatment is too limited;
(8) a comprehensive and coordinated array of appropriate
private and public mental health and support services for all
people in need within specific geographic areas, based upon a
cooperative local-State-Federal partnership, remains the most
effective and humane way to provide a majority of mentally ill
individuals with mental health care and needed support; and
(9) because of the rising demand for mental health services and
the wide disparity in the distribution of psychiatrists, clinical
psychologists, social workers, and psychiatric nurses, there is a
shortage in the medical specialty of psychiatry and there are
also shortages among the other health personnel who provide
mental health services.
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