The Need for Reform: The Tampa Tribune 02 24 2003

Since our organization was specifically mentioned in your editorial titled ``Proposed Baker Act Reforms Carry A Distinct Downside'' (Feb. 17), I would like to respond.

The Tribune editors report that some Florida judges are concerned that an update to the state's 30-year-old mental illness treatment law will increase their workload. Without reform, there was a 14 percent increase in the number of people who had multiple Baker Act emergency psychiatric evaluations last year alone.

It is not the reform proposal, but the current Baker Act that creates a ``second-class citizenry'' by preventing the state from providing sustained community services for Floridians who are too sick from severe mental illnesses to appreciate their need for medication and treatment. Rather than stymieing efforts to address the treatment needs of this vulnerable population, Supreme Court justices in Wisconsin unanimously praised ``the efforts of ... professional organizations which recognized a need for a law that could be applied to those victims of mental illness who fell through the cracks under the old statutory scheme.'' The court recognized the need to mandate treatment for ``those who have been in treatment before and yet remain at risk of severe harm, i.e., those who are chronically mentally ill and drop out of therapy or discontinue medication, giving rise to a substantial probability of a deterioration in condition.''

Since New York passed a law substantially like the Florida Sheriff's Association proposal, Florida has been one of only nine states that do not allow for court-ordered community treatment. In holding New York's law constitutional, a judge wrote that it filled a void in the state's system of caring for the mentally ill that arose when those who ``no longer posed a danger to themselves or others while in the hospital and accepting medication, stopped taking their medication upon release.''

Rather than dismissing the only measure that has been proposed to reduce the dramatically increasing number of Baker Act cases, one might learn something from jurists in other states who have come to recognize that it is just and humane to intervene for those too helpless to recognize that they need treatment before they deteriorate to a harmful condition.<