Texas lawmakers should give mental health the same attention and awareness as bodily health issues.

It’s time state officials take illness of the mind as seriously as illness of the body.

The technical term is “parity.” For Susan Fordice, president and CEO of Mental Health America of Greater Houston, it’s “reattaching head to body when it comes to health care.” For insurers, lawmakers and the rest of us, it’s an acknowledgement that mental health and physical health are one and the same and deserve the same level of attention, awareness and support. It’s a concept that the state of Texas, until fairly recently, has been reluctant to grasp.

To his credit, House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, seems to be aware of the need for parity when it comes to mental health, not only insurance parity but parity of concern. Last week he formed an interim committee to “take a wideranging look at the state’s behavioral health system for children and adults.” In this state, it will take an IMAX-style approach, at least, to encompass the range of deficiencies in mental health treatment. Straus’ House Select Committee on Mental Health is the first such panel since 1995.

Local mental health advocates are pleased that three Houston lawmakers who are knowledgeable and serious about the issues — Republican Sarah Davis and Democrats Senfronia Thompson and Garnet Coleman — are among the 13 committee members. State Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, will chair the panel, with state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, serving as vice chair. Those appointments suggest that Straus is serious about uncovering answers, strategies and solutions.

The panel will study mental health care, substance abuse treatment, ways of improving early identification and treatment and increasing collaboration and measurement of outcomes. Services for rural Texans, veterans and the homeless will get special attention.

The state’s dismal numbers are by now depressingly familiar: Texas ranks 49th in per capita mental health spending, according to figures compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. About 200 of the 254 counties in the state are federally designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, which means there are more than 30,000 people per psychiatric professional. As the Chronicle’s Brian Rosenthal reported last week, just 36 percent of Texas adults with mental illness receive help, according to the advocacy group Mental Health America. That figure makes us 44th in the nation. We’re tempted to say it’s crazy, the way we shortchange the state’s mental health needs.

One result of our self-imposed penury is that we’ve transformed our criminal justice system into latter-day Bedlams. Approximately 76,000 people with some form of mental illness get their treatment, however inadequate, from city and county jails. The Harris County lockup, in fact, is the largest provider of psychiatric treatment in the state. That’s unfair to those who desperately need help, unfair, as well, to those professionals whose primary duty is law enforcement.

Granted, lawmakers have increased spending on mental health by about $200 million annually in recent years, but so much remains to be done. Whether it’s the day-today struggles of our friends, neighbors and loved ones with bipolar disorder, depression, addiction or other forms of mental illness; whether it’s families and individuals trying to cope with such debilitating conditions as schizophrenia; whether it’s an alarmingly high rate of suicide among white, working-class males in late middle age (as a recent study has found) or whether it’s the bynow regular outbreaks of mass shootings in this country, we see the needs all around us.

We’re hopeful the committee will put aside politics and address the need to expand the mental health workforce, to find ways to reach underserved and rural populations and to increase community-care options, among a number of other challenges. We can even hope that politics will recede so far that the committee will recommend Medicaid expansion, so that more Texans than ever before have access to good mental health care.

That may be stretching the wish list a bit far — this is ideologically sclerotic Texas, of course — but we can always hope, as does state Rep. Coleman. “Mental health crosses into so many areas of public policy, whether it’s criminal justice, juvenile justice, education or health care in general, and this is the best way to look at it, by bringing together people who are familiar with the different areas,” the veteran lawmaker told the Chronicle. “This is a great thing.”

We agree.