We should focus on expanding services

The Oct. 28 article on drama therapy for patients at Western State Hospital cast an all-too-infrequent positive light on the fact that people with mental illness are people, and that recovery happens [“‘Acting out’ toward healing,” NWWednesday].

People can get better and reclaim their lives. Innovative treatments help to bring that about.

In contrast, the guest commentary by Mike Johnson is filled with inflammatory rhetoric and contributes nothing meaningful to what is really needed in our mental health system today [“Mental-health policies are killing people,” Opinion, Oct. 29].

Expansion of the Involuntary Treatment Act and committing more people to services is not the answer. It is an example of yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems.

What is needed are more services and a greater diversity to those services. Many people cannot access mental-health services, period. Many others find the choices related to services so limiting they make the choice of having nothing to do with the system.

We should advocate for increased resources to expand access, while also increasing the variety of offered services such as peer counseling, housing first, psychiatric rehabilitation and supported employment rather than suggest a return to the Dark Ages of institutionalization.

The benefits of such an approach would mean enhanced safety for the larger community, while also providing far better care for those with serious mental illness.

— Jonathan R. Beard, Seattle

Deinstitutionalization is killing people too

Thanks to Mike Johnson for his poignant column regarding the unintended and unforeseen negative results of deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill, which has led to tragic consequences for so many people.

Those of us who have worked in mental health, social services, hospitals and the criminal-justice system, or who have ill family members know firsthand how heartbreaking it is to watch people fall through the cracks of the system, and to be unable to help them unless they fall into the category of being at risk of harming themselves or at risk of harming others.

Somebody once said to me sarcastically that since deinstitutionalization, the mentally ill are now free to die with their rights fully in place. Another sad fact is that many of the homeless with mental illness problems are actually veterans who have served this country.

As Johnson suggested, surely there could be a middle policy ground between former institutionalization practices and the current situation where we must stand by helplessly while so many self-destruct before our very eyes.

— Bambi Lin Litchman, Tacoma