Commitment Rule Is Key To Changing The System

In contrast with Fairfax, Alexandria and Arlington County dismiss about a third of their commitment cases. In Richmond, less than 6 percent of cases were dismissed in fiscal 2006-07, and 94 percent were ordered into treatment. Norfolk orders about 80 percent into treatment. The statistics in Prince William and Loudoun counties are similar to those in Fairfax.

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The Reston man who advocates eliminating the standard called for help recently after his son obsessed that federal authorities were eavesdropping on him. He destroyed a toilet and punched holes in the wall. Fairfax's Mobile Crisis Unit came to their home and "agreed that he was very disturbed," the man said. "But in their judgment, what he was saying and doing would not pass the threshold for imminent danger. And having sat through these hearings before, I had to agree with them."

A few weeks later, with what his father described as "a crazed look in his eyes," the young man attacked his father. The father called police, and the son was arrested. He is being treated in a mental hospital while awaiting trial on an assault charge. It took the criminal charge to get the young man held.

"Ideally, when we see terrible things happening," the father said, "we should have been able, before that point was reached, to say, 'This kid is in danger and needs to be treated.' We just couldn't get past that threshold."

Until 2003, Maryland required a "clear and imminent danger" to get an emergency psychiatric evaluation. Two events involving mentally ill people, including the shooting of two Prince George's County sheriff's deputies in 2002, helped persuade the legislature to delete the words "clear and imminent."

Under the District's legal standard, someone must be mentally ill and "likely to injure himself or others," which some advocates think is too tough.

There's hardly unanimity on the issue in Virginia. And the future of "imminent danger," and whether more people are forced into treatment, might hinge on whether a coalition of libertarians and former mental health patients can successfully fight to preserve the standard as the proper test to decide how to handle a mentally ill person who doesn't want help.

"I would make the standard higher than what it is," said Alison Hymes, who is on the task force examining the commitment process. "I think we're having too many people committed in Virginia, people who are committed who are not a danger to anyone."

"In most places, the hearing is a joke, kind of like Cho's hearing," she said, referring to the commitment hearing in December 2005 for Cho, the Tech gunman.

After Cho was temporarily detained overnight in a mental hospital for expressing suicidal thoughts and possibly stalking female students, he was examined briefly by a psychologist. At his commitment hearing the next day, neither the psychologist nor the police officer who detained him appeared. The attorney for Cho, theoretically fighting for his client's freedom, instead read the allegations against him into the record.

Defenders of the process say, however, that after a doctor determined that Cho was not mentally ill or an imminent danger, the special justice ordered Cho into outpatient treatment. Most special justices would have dismissed the case without a hearing once a doctor found no illness or danger, experts said, but the special justice in Cho's case sought help for him. But Cho did not follow through, and the local Community Services Board did not check to see whether he had.

"I feel that we've had a very emotional reaction to the tragedy at Virginia Tech," Hymes said. "This is being used in an emotional way, and we're getting bad law. I think they're going to erode our civil rights."