Mentally ill have safety net

Is anyone surprised the man accused of assaulting three people downtown with lighter fluid is mentally ill?

This kind of thing happens and I ask myself why we don't take mental health seriously and do something for the benefit of the sick person and the rest of us. The Legislature is studying a mental-health parity bill that would require insurers to treat mental health the same as other medical problems in policies for small business and individuals.

But what about mentally ill offenders? It turns out there are some efforts to address that problem, spurred by a spate of attacks 10 years ago.

In 1997, Stanley Stevenson, a retired Seattle Fire Department captain, was walking to his car after a Mariners game. Dan Van Ho, 11 days out of the King County Jail, stabbed Stevenson to death.

King County settled with Stevenson's family for $5.5 million. But it wasn't an isolated case. That year, the state paid a $6.3 million wrongful-death claim to the family of a Tacoma girl killed by a parolee.

The county and state set out to fix the way they release dangerous, often mentally ill people back into the community.

They created mental-health courts to deal with people for whom regular courts were inadequate.

The Legislature created a project that put police, mental-health workers, jails and prisons together on the same team and provided for intervention with inmates months before their release dates and close tracking afterward.

The private, nonprofit Seattle Mental Health (SMH) has been a core part of the new strategy.

Declan Wynne, an Irish immigrant and SMH's director of integrated services, works out of an office on Capitol Hill. He loves a challenge. In this case, it's mending lives and making streets safer.

He says the people his staff deals with often have three problems: crime, mental illness and chemical dependency.

Wynne's clinicians are qualified mental-health and drug counselors. They start working with clients three months before they are released, so when they get out, a relationship already has been established.

They make sure the clients have a place to stay, that they aren't dumped on the street where temptation abounds.

Clinicians don't just wait for clients to come to regular sessions, they go and get them if necessary.

SMH keeps client loads low enough to ensure clients aren't reduced to dusty files.

In 10 years, Wynne recalls only one client who committed another violent crime. "She hit someone with her fist," he said.

And this is a population that includes murderers and rapists.

SMH has 500 offender clients on a given day. More people need the program than it can handle. Funding is an issue. The programs will never cover everyone because people can't be forced to comply.

It looks like the mental-health courts are making a positive difference, but more research is needed.

Maybe there will always be people who slip through the cracks. But at least those cracks are getting smaller.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.