Evelyn Lundberg commentary: Bill would clarify that courts can help deal with mentally ill

Growing up, I had no exposure to people with mental illness. I was born in Thailand, the daughter of American missionaries. At age 6, I went to a boarding school in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

However, I had lots of exposure to mass killings, for I was in South Vietnam up until 1968, when the war was at its worst. I returned to America at age 18 to go to college. It wasn’t until I was elected as a trial judge in Franklin County that I first became aware of the real issues of mental illness.

So many defendants in my court would not have been there had they been properly cared for in the mental-health system. Starting in the 1950s, we closed most of our mental-health hospitals in a well-intentioned move to provide “the least restrictive environment.” But we never built the many community health centers to replace the hospitals and continued to cut funding for mental-health services. So instead, those with mental illness often ended up under bridges, in shelters, on the streets, in jails, prisons and courts — that’s where I encountered them.

With all the budgetary cuts and restrictions, many families often turn to the courts and police for help because there are no other resources for them to assist their loved ones. Jails and prisons become the de facto mental-health system. Mental-health courts, where a team led by a judge works to stop the revolving door of jail and prisons, was one response to this crisis of lack of care. I became very involved in Ohio and nationally in the creation of such mental-health courts. But we need other tools to deal with mental illness long before an arrest occurs.

The common denominator in mass killings has not been guns. Timothy McVeigh did not use a gun. If we restrict guns, what do we do with the millions of guns currently in circulation? Do we simply create another market and pipeline for drug dealers? No, the real issue in each mass killing has been an underlying mental-health problem.

One solution is to deal with the issues of mental illness. We may not be able to prevent the occasional mass killing that will result from somebody determined to do so. Several of the killers showed no real signs that would lead anyone to believe they would engage in such behavior. But there needs to be more focus on the millions of people with mental illness who will never commit a mass killing, but who are clearly in dire need of help in many different ways.

But those people will struggle to survive in our society. Families are anguished and cry for help, often to be turned away because their loved ones under the law have not demonstrated dangerousness sufficient to be committed to inpatient treatment. Families are often told that there is no help if the family member has only threatened someone but hasn’t acted on it yet. But by then, isn’t it too late? A person with serious mental illness has a life expectancy of only 59; they die 20 to 25 years sooner than others. Why is that not a shocking public crisis?

We have a tool already in court-ordered outpatient treatment, which allows probate judges to order outpatient treatment for somebody who does not need a full, expensive and often unavailable hospitalization. Under outpatient treatment, a judge can supervise a treatment plan for somebody who is unable to make a rational decision for his own health. Unfortunately, one of the main symptoms of mental illness is the inability to even recognize that you have one.

However, many judges and prosecutors don’t believe that the current law allows such outpatient treatment. Therefore, proposed Senate Bill 350 clearly states that judges have that authority and families can seek that help, a tool desperately needed by families and loved ones to deal with a person who has mental illness.

Since I have retired from the Supreme Court of Ohio, I am now able to express an opinion on issues. We need this bill. I’ve witnessed for too many years the struggles of people with mental illness through the work I have done both in Ohio and nationally. It is a simple tool that can be quickly implemented while the debate over gun control continues. Everyone can and should come together on this, be they Republican, Democrat, independent, pro- or anti-gun control.

It will, in the end, save more lives and, better yet, improve the lives of both people with an illness and those families who love them.

Evelyn Lundberg Stratton is a former justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.