Will new mental health law help or hinder?

Little-heralded legislation signed into law last month will make it easier for family members to commit a loved one to a mental hospital and is "of paramount importance" in mental health circles, one of its sponsors says.

Rep. David Leitch, R-Peoria, who sponsored Senate Bill 234 in the Illinois House, says it will ease the way for commitments of people who have deteriorated to where they can't recognize their mental illness or have become a threat to harm themselves or others.

"The frustration that so many parents and caretakers of mentally ill people have had is they have to stand there and watch an inevitable pattern repeat itself where that person is at the lowest of the low before they can do anything to help them," Leitch says.

The new law, however, is not without its detractors.

"We were very strongly opposed to it for a number of reasons," says Marsha Koelliker, public policy director for the statewide advocacy group Equip for Equality.

"While this has been couched as enabling people to receive treatment earlier, it really is a bill that the goal is to force people into a hospital or mental health facility earlier - that is, to confine them against their will," she says.

The new law won't take effect until next June. Before a person can be involuntarily committed, current law requires proof that he or she "is reasonably expected to inflict serious physical harm on himself or herself in the near future."

"If you couldn't determine that that was in the near future, you couldn't do anything about it," says Linda Virgil, legislative public policy chair for the Illinois branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. "(It) was just so difficult to meet that standard."

The new law omits that language.

It also will allow involuntary commitment of someone who engages in "dangerous conduct." The legislation defines that as "threatening behavior or conduct that places another individual in reasonable expectation of being harmed, or a person's inability to provide, without the assistance of family or outside help, for his or her basic physical needs so as to guard himself or herself from serious harm."

Rep. Patricia Lindner, R-Aurora, says the new statute might have saved lives in her hometown. For almost 10 years, Norma Piazza and her husband, Eugene, had asked the courts to force their son, Gerald, to continue mental health treatment after he had exhibited repeated bizarre behavior. He was arrested in 1996 after he killed his father and brother James.

"IF ONLY we could have succeeded in getting help for our son, this tragedy would not have occurred," Piazza wrote in the newsletter for the Kane County affiliate of NAMI.

"You can see these patterns," Leitch says. "When a person begins feeling better, they'll quit taking the meds, and then they will start spiraling downward. And everybody in that family knows what's coming next.

"So the goal of this legislation is to permit those families to intervene in this before you reach a dangerous, serious situation."

Equip for Equality believes, however, that the new law may not pass constitutional muster because it is too broad. A better solution, Koelliker says, would be for state government to provide more money for current mental health treatment.

"We're so underfunded that we can't service the people who actually voluntarily want treatment right now," she says. "By passing this legislation, essentially it enables the policy makers to say, 'We've done something about this problem' when we believe, in fact, they haven't done anything."

Leitch, long an advocate for mental health issues in the General Assembly, agrees that the current mental health system is damaged.

"Any recovery in Illinois is accidental in the state system," he says. "It's archaic, expensive and totally ineffective."

Leitch says he also understands Equip for Equality's concerns about abuses of involuntary commitment laws.

"We don't want Granny locked up because the kids don't want to take care of her. Nobody does." But that's not the case "99 percent of the time," he says.

Nearly half of the states have adopted legislation similar to the new Illinois law, Virgil says.

"They're all attempting to do the same thing," she says. "Incidents across the nation over time made people realize we need to do something to help people get needed treatment."

Dr. Arun Pinto, medical director of the Human Service Center in Peoria, also supports the legislation and says when it becomes law, families "won't have to wait until a family member becomes really sick" before forcing him or her to get help.

Like any new procedure, it may take awhile to assess how well the new law will work, he says.

"I don't know that any of us will truly be able to understand its impact until we begin to practice with it," says Pinto, a psychiatrist at the mental health center.

Dana Heupel can be reached at 788-1518 or dana.heupel@sj-r.com.