Letter to the editor
Treat mental illness before tragedy

You previously, in exceptional fashion, wrote of the “Catch-22” that confounds securing psychiatric treatment for people who have been rendered incapable of informed medical decisions by the symptoms of an untreated mental illness [“Citizen Kayne: Prisoners of illness,” CW, Feb. 17]. That issue has recently again been thrust in the faces of all New Mexicans.

Albuquerque papers have overflowed with stories on the deaths of five people at the apparent hands of John Hyde. While the details of Hyde’s condition are still emerging, it is clear that lack of treatment for his severe psychiatric disorder was the chief cause of these tragedies. If rarely in such attention-grabbing fashion, lives are regularly sacrificed to the acute symptoms of mental illnesses - nationally, almost 300,000 with these afflictions are incarcerated and more than 200,000 homeless; each year about 5,000 with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia commit suicide and hundreds of people without a severe mental illness lose their lives because someone with one goes untreated.

New Mexico is more susceptible to these ravages than almost any other state.

For many of those lost to these brain illnesses, voluntary treatment is not an option - the diseases themselves impair their ability to recognize that they are, in fact, desperately sick. Many other states have adopted commitment standards that permit courts to order care well before catastrophe looms; New Mexicans lost to mental illnesses can only be helped if they are more likely than not to cause serious harm in the near future.

New Mexico is also one of only eight states that does not permit assisted outpatient treatment, which is court-ordered intensive and sustained psychiatric treatment in the community. This treatment mechanism is a remarkably successful way to help some of those most severely affected by psychiatric disorders.

Of those in the first five years of New York’s assisted outpatient treatment program, 74 percent fewer experienced homelessness, 77 percent less psychiatric hospitalization, 83 percent fewer arrest, and 87 percent less incarceration than before the initiation of court-ordered care. Moreover, 55 percent fewer recipients engaged in suicide attempts or physical harm to themselves; 47 percent less harmed others. And perhaps most telling is the appreciation for the program of those in it - three out of every four participants said that the law had helped them regain control of their lives; four out of five believed that it helped them to get and stay well.

New York and the majority of other states have taken actions that protect their citizens with the most severe mental illnesses as well as those without them. When will New Mexico follow suit?

More information about what other states do to secure treatment for those who are most incapacitated by mental illness is on the Treatment Advocacy Center’s website at psychlaws.org. All statistics from “Kendra’s Law: Final Report on the Status of Assisted Outpatient Treatment,” New York State Office of Mental Health (March 2005), are available at omh.state.ny.us/omhweb/Kendra_web/finalreport/.

Jonathan Stanley, J.D.
Assistant Director
Treatment Advocacy Center
Arlington, VA