Unfortunately, the tragic ending to the life of Robert Brown, shot at 30th Street Station, is not an isolated event.

Newspapers carry similar stories almost every day. And while the actions of the Amtrak police deserve serious scrutiny, so do the actions and inactions of the legal and health-care systems that should be helping the mentally ill, but too often don't.

I am familiar with the ineffectiveness of these organizations because my family experienced the pain of schizophrenia firsthand. To isolate the police ignores the complexity of the situation.

More than 2 million Americans - 1 percent of the population - suffer from schizophrenia. The disease victimizes not only the individual but also family members, whose pain and suffering are indescribable. Adding together those who have schizophrenia and their loved ones, it is easy to see that this tragic disease affects an incredible number of people.

While most schizophrenic individuals are not violent and most do not die violent deaths, most experience tragic lives and many have tragic deaths. Ordinarily, any disease that affected so many would receive a great deal of attention, but mental illness, because of the stigma, is too often hidden in the closet by both family members and medical professionals alike.

My sister, diagnosed with depression in her 20s and schizophrenia at age 40, was once a talented woman who won painting competitions and could play piano by ear. She graduated near the top of her class at Germantown High School and from Temple University, and became a Philadelphia public school teacher, continuing her education with graduate courses at Penn.

Like Robert Brown, my sister had been mentally ill for half of her life when she died at age 54. Unlike Brown, she died of a physical illness, which, if diagnosed and treated at an early stage, is curable.

At the time my sister was diagnosed, the newer drugs now available to treat schizophrenia, which cause fewer side effects than the older drugs, were not available. But these newer drugs would not have made a difference, because she refused to take any medication. This is not uncommon among people who are paranoid. Neither psychiatrists nor my mother had the legal authority to require that she take medication. In my last conversation with my sister, I suggested a new drug that had been shown to be effective in controlling her symptoms when other drugs had failed. She accused me of trying to kill her.

During the last year of her life, my sister became homeless. She could still afford her apartment, but her paranoia led her to believe she was safer on the street. She threatened my mother and me with restraining orders if we tried to intervene. My requests for help from city agencies that serve the homeless and from a national organization proved fruitless.

Then the letters and phone calls stopped. I began searching the newspapers on the Internet looking for stories about a homeless woman being murdered.

She died tragically and alone in June 1997, but her death remained unknown to my mother and me for 20 months because a lawyer my sister had named as executor and major beneficiary of her estate failed to notify us. This attorney hired a lawyer in Philadelphia to administer her estate.

Neither had ever met my sister, but both knew she was mentally ill. The executor had spoken with her on the phone when she was being evicted from her previous apartment for harassing the management. The administrator had to know she was mentally ill from "the writings" he found in her belongings and the fact that she was homeless. Court rules require that next of kin not included in a will be notified in the case of such deaths. Neither lawyer followed this requirement, and no officer of the court read the documents in order to discover that this requirement had not been heeded.

Police, called by the hospital to obtain my sister's belongings from a room where she was staying temporarily, filed a report that included information about my mother. This was among my sister's belongings, yet the attorneys both told me they did not know she had family.

Yes, police need more training in how to handle encounters with individuals who are mentally ill. Yet this is not the sole solution to this vast public-health problem. We need to solve the dilemma families and physicians face when an individual incapable of making his or her own medical decisions refuses treatment. To change state laws that restrict treating individuals who refuse treatment, input must be obtained from survivors of mental illnesses, family members, medical professionals and advocates for the civil rights of the mentally ill.

Most of all, society needs to recognize that mental disorders are illnesses. Surely no one would choose to live the life my sister or Robert Brown lived. With this recognition must come adequate resources to understand, prevent and cure these devastating illnesses.

Susan L. Greenblatt is a sociologist and writer who is originally from Philadelphia and now lives in Massachusetts. Her e-mail address is [email protected].