Seattle, state need to support Mental Health Transformation Project

When brains don't work everything else suffers.

People don't have impressive claws or massive teeth. We can't fly or scoot along on a cushion of slime (certain professions excepted).Our main tool for making it through life is the human brain, which unfortunately doesn't come with an instruction manual or a repair kit.

But research is advancing rapidly, and now a handful of states, including Washington, are using federal grants to help them figure out how to put more of what we've learned to use.

Almost every challenge we face, every problem we have, has a brain connection.

Having ADHD can interfere with kids' education.

Post traumatic stress disorder creates new problems for people who've had to deal with tragic circumstances.

Depression hurts job performance and disrupts marriages.

Homelessness could be reduced by better prevention and treatment of mental illnesses. As many as a quarter of homeless people have serious mental illnesses.

Crime would drop if we made better use of what we now know about brain function.

The majority of people in jails and prisons have mental-health problems, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Over the past several days a King County jury has faced prolonged deliberations in the trial of Naveed Haq, who pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the Jewish Federation shootings.

We still don't always know where to draw the line in cases that involve mental illness.

What if Haq's problems had been prevented or detected and treated?

I'm hoping we'll get to that point.

Then there's Clinton Grainger, the Snohomish County house painter who fired a shot during the Northwest Folklife Festival and injured three people.

His mental illness had been recognized and he'd gotten some treatment for that and for drug addiction.

His case raises questions about the current state of mental-health care, and also highlights the difficulty of addressing these issues. When I read that Snohomish County had issued Grainger a concealed-weapons permit, I figured they'd messed up.

In fact, records about his mental problems were never made available to them.

That's because of a desire to protect people's privacy. Privacy is an issue because there is still a stigma attached to mental illness, which can stop people from seeking treatment.

Cases like his further stigmatize mental illness and cast doubt on its treatability when what we need is better treatment and less stigma.

We have a distance to go yet.

A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting of a new entity, the Mental Health Transformation Project of Washington.

It's part of a national effort to help public policy on mental health catch up to recent advances in our understanding of the brain.

Scores of partners in this effort are at work on recommendations that we'll see in coming weeks.

I really hope they use their brains on this. We need help.

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