"Societal priority": Intervening? Incarcerating?

Tom Davis, columnist for New Jersey's Bergen County Record, weighs in on Andrew Goldstein's sentencing.

Many people with mental illness can't get treatment unless they show they're a threat to themselves and to others, said Debra Wentz, who heads the New Jersey
Association of Mental Health Agencies.

And, even then, the treatment is questionable, she said."It really goes back to a societal priority -- what if that person was bleeding to death on the street? Would they help him then?" Wentz said. "To fail to treat a man who was delusional and paranoid and clearly ill -- it's a clear failure in the system."

- "Prison is no place for the ill," December 5, 2006