Is Anyone but AbleChild Willing to Call Out Shapiro’s Proven Lie About a “New” Behavioral Health Commission?
Republished with permission from AbleChild.
The PA governor’s announcement to “grow oversight” by adding yet another behavioral health body is not reform; it is the expansion of failed state power over families trapped in a system that has already proven it cannot deliver on its promises. Act 54 of 2022 created the Behavioral Health Commission for Adult Mental Health and put 24 system insiders in charge of advising his administration and the legislature on how to shape policy and spend mental‑health dollars. That commission has toured the state, taken testimony, and issued recommendations that flow right back into the same bureaucracy that has left people homeless, incarcerated, over‑drugged, and without real community care.
Instead of independent scrutiny, the governor is now trying to grow another head on this snake pit and sell it as “oversight.” For children and families, that means more commissions inside the behavioral‑health bubble, more power for the networks that profit from labeling, drugging, and tracking them, and still no enforceable right to informed consent, exit plans, or full risk disclosure on powerful psychotropic drugs. Investigations have already shown that Pennsylvania’s behavioral‑health system fails to build the community care it promised, pushes vulnerable people into jails and prisons, and leaves counties warning that funding for real services “falls massively short.”
AbleChild has seen this pattern nationwide: politicians build “councils,” “commissions,” and “task forces” that answer to them and their contractors, while fraud, data gaps, and the abuse of psychotropic drugs on children in state care persist for years without consequence. True oversight would start with forensic audits of Medicaid behavioral‑health spending, full public reporting of prescribing and outcome data for children in state custody, and enforceable informed‑consent protections with real exit plans for every psychiatric label and drug. Until the governor is prepared to do that, every new “oversight” announcement is just another expansion of failed state power, more control for a system that has already shown it cannot be trusted with the lives of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable citizens.
Why it’s a provable lie
Act 54 of 2022 already created the Behavioral Health Commission for Adult Mental Health and tasked it with advising on how to spend 100 million dollars in adult behavioral‑health funds.
That commission has already met, toured, and issued a formal report with recommendations to the General Assembly and administration on workforce, crisis systems, housing, criminal‑justice links, and more.
Shapiro then added a Behavioral Health Council by executive order in 2023, again centralizing “oversight” and coordination under his administration.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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