Why counties need to care about treatment laws

A story in today’s St. Paul Pioneer Press serves as yet another reminder why counties need to support laws permitting timely and humane treatment for severe mental illnesses. As the story illustrates, failure to properly treat someone can result in huge liability issues for counties. The best way to avoid this? Ensure proper treatment.

The parents of a 28-year-old New Richmond man who died in the St. Croix County Jail six months ago are accusing the county of wrongful death and are seeking $3 million in damages… his father has said his son's death should have and could have been prevented…

Hessler had battled mental illness, and his father had him committed to institutional care in 2000. With care and medication, Hessler's condition improved, and he was released. He had several run-ins with law enforcement in subsequent years.

Staggering stat

A 40 percent increase in the numbers of homeless people isn't drawing much attention - perhaps because the temperature in St. Paul, Minnesota, is a lovely 76 degrees today. Of course, in January that drops to an average of 21 degrees.

For the 40 percent of that group with a diagnosed mental illness, the impending cold weather is just one of the many dangers they face.

A research group says it found 587 homeless people in the [St. Paul] area last fall, a 49 percent increase since 2003. The study found more than 40 percent of the homeless were told within the last two years that they have a serious mental illness such as major depression, schizophrenia or post traumatic stress disorder.

Mentally Ill, Homeless & in the Snow

That a large proportion of those who are homeless also have a mental illness is beyond debate. Coming up with the exact number of those coping with both homelessness and mental illness is more problematic.

Counting and categorizing the diagnoses of those among a transient population, whose members tend to be without mailing addresses and phones, is a formidable task. A good estimate, however, is that there are 200,000 people with severe mental illness among the 600,000 who live in America’s streets and shelters. This means that one in three people without homes are homeless, at least in part, because of the symptoms of mostly treatable psychiatric illnesses.

The results of an extensive survey of people in Minnesota who are homeless found that 52 percent of them had a serious mental illness, such as severe depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. That percentage is significantly ones found by other researchers. That could be a sign that the prevalence is increasing. A perhaps more likely alternative is that people incapacitated by a severe mental illness are less likely to appreciate that escaping the frigid Minnesota winters can make being homeless at least a little less arduous.

More than the lack of a home

According to a recent report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, almost three-quarter of a million were homeless in a single month of 2005. Included were 3,415 people who were homeless in Minneapolis. Given the high concentration of those suffering from mental illness among those living in the streets and shelters, it is not surprising that Minneapolis is seeking to alleviate homelessness among that beleaguered population.

The city is offering attractive and purposefully affordable housing with no strings attached. It’s the logical approach – solve homelessness with homes, but that’s not working in Minneapolis because there have been few takers. Fifty vouchers for highly-subsidized housing where given to the Assertive Community Treatment team dedicated to serving the municipality’s homeless population. Since then, only five people with mental illness have taken the chance to move from the streets into a place of their own. The rest remain homeless, braving a Minnesota winter either by choice or – perhaps more likely – by illness.

Sad story from Minnesota

Shortly after Stephen R. Miles was arrested for the slaying of his stepmother last December, attention focused on the family's unsuccessful attempts to hospitalize him just hours before the grisly killing in Burnsville. But parents Roland and Carol Miles struggled for years to get help for their 23-year old son, especially in the days and months before Maris Jo Miles died, recently filed court documents show. As the parents, social workers and doctors became concerned about Miles' worsening condition last year, each of them was powerless by themselves to force treatment on an adult who refused to take anti-psychotic medications. "The system is designed so that you have to fail first," said Sue Hanson, a mental health advocate and mother of a schizophrenic son. " And then you have to continue to be ill in order to receive help."

Miles is accused of decapitating his stepmother. Read the chilling transcript of his emergency room visit before the murder ...

A mother speaks

There are too many stories about mothers with untreated severe mental illnesses who kill their children – and too few answers to the questions of “why?”.

You rarely hear directly from the mothers themselves, people like Andrea Yates or Lashaun Harris.

An unusual jailhouse interview with Naomi Gaines sheds some light … Gaines threw her 14-month-old twin sons into the river in St. Paul and then jumped in after them. She and one of the babies were rescued.

"I know how I was feeling that day. I know I was not the same Naomi who got up with my kids a million times before and fed them and bathed them and walked them and breast-fed them and cared for them," she says. "I wasn't that same person. So I know that I would never hurt them if I had had my sanity."