If you want to know why it is important to educate prosecutors about mental illnesses and to push for the creation of mental health courts consider the plight of Sean Duvall, a homeless Persian Gulf War veteran in Virginia.
When the 45 year-old Duvall sank into a depression last June, he considered ending his life. He wrote a suicide note to his family, put a letter confirming his eligibility to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery in his pocket, and made a homemade gun fashioned from a pipe.
But before he took his own life, he saw a telephone number for a Veterans Administration crisis line.
He called it and a counselor urged him to say put.  Help was on the way. A police officer arrived and took Duvall to a psychiatric facility, where he was treated for depression and began feeling better.
This should have been a success story, especially since veterans are ending their lives at a rate of 18 per day.
Sadly, it isn’t.
Nine days later, Duvall was charged in a federal court with possessing a homemade gun and three other gun related charges that could land him in jail for forty years.

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If you don’t believe it is important to have police officers undergo special training that teaches them how to handle persons who are mentally ill, then you should look at incidents that happened in Florida and in California in counties that happen to share the same name.

Orlando Police Department Sgt. Tami Edwards in Florida was dispatched to investigate a telephone call about a distraught woman who was threatening to jump from the ledge of  the seventh floor in a parking garage. Sgt. Edwards, who had undergone Crisis Intervention Team training for police officers,  found the woman sitting with her legs dangling over the ledge. The woman was paranoid, delusional and was talking about how government agencies were spying on her.

Because of her CIT training, Sgt. Edwards recognized that the woman had a severe mental illness. The police officer talked to her in a calm voice and took time to listen to the woman’s delusions. She was able to get close to her. While Edwards was speaking, back up officers arrived. Without warning, the woman suddenly pushed herself from the ledge.

In a remarkable act of heroism, Sgt. Edwards grabbed the woman. Click to continue…

I receive emails every week from parents frustrated by our broken mental health system. I believe these notes paint a more accurate picture of what is happening across our nation than the often optimistic reports that I hear from our elected leaders. Here’s an example of what a mother faced recently in Vermont after her son became ill and needed treatment.

My 19-year-old son was recently hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. We live in Burlington, Vermont. He had been seeing a psychiatrist at a local center here, and started on treatment with medication. We tried several different meds for him, with the doctor seeing him once a month. We soon realized we needed to either up the dosage or change all together because my son was not getting any better. I made numerous calls to the local mental health center, explaining his anxiety, delusions, anger, and the voices he stated he was hearing.  

All fell on deaf ears.

On 11/19/2011, I received a phone call from the local police station. My son had been arrested for simple assault and was found wandering the town with a knife. I immediately called the center and they sent a crisis person to the police station, who in turn evaluated him and agreed he was in need of hospitalization. 

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About once a month, I receive a panicky telephone call or email from a distraught parent who attempted to get an adult child with a mental disorder  involuntarily committed in Fairfax County, Virginia, where I live.

Forcing someone into a hospital for treatment is a desperate act that is traumatic for the person who is ill and their entire family. It should only be done when all other options have failed.

The parents who contact me were stymied by one of the special magistrates who ultimately decide if a person meets the legal criteria to be forced into a hospital. We have three such magistrates in our suburban Washington D.C. county and two of them, Mark H. Bodner and Jose E. Aunon,  are known state-wide for being reluctant to approve involuntary commitments.

“My son,” one caller told me, “has a long history of mental illness. He was living in our basement where he was hearing voices and talked about killing himself.”

Another parent said, “Our daughter was violent and her psychiatrist recommended that she be hospitalized.”

In both instances, the Fairfax special magistrates refused to authorize an involuntary commitment, the parents reported.

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