In the year since Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on a crowd in Tucson, leaving six people dead and 13 wounded, we have seen an enormous amount of public hand-wringing over how to prevent such tragedies but little progress from mental health officials toward actually doing it.
It was not always so.
On January 4, 1999, journalist and photographer Kendra Webdale, 32, was shoved into the path of an oncoming train in lower Manhattan by a stranger suffering from untreated schizophrenia. It took less than a year for New York to respond with “Kendra’s Law,” which authorized courts to order individuals who meet strict legal criteria into treatment for their severe mental illnesses. Since the law took effect, thousands of people have been served to their own well-documented benefit and that of the New York communities where they live.
On January 10, 2000, former high school valedictorian Laura Wilcox, 19, was gunned down by a man with untreated schizophrenia in the Nevada County, California, mental health department where she was volunteering over her winter break from Haverford College. Two others were shot and killed by the assailant the same day. It took two years, but California passed a law known as “Laura’s Law,” which authorized counties to implement assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) if they chose to. Since the law took effect, only two have exercised the option, and only one – Nevada County – has implemented it fully, but several counties are currently considering implementation after their own preventable tragedies in 2011.
On January 8, 2011, budding elementary school politician Christina Taylor Green, 9, was shot to death by a man with untreated schizophrenia in the Safeway parking lot where she’d gone to meet Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Five others died with her when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire, and 13 more were wounded, including Giffords, who remains severely injured.
In the year since that Saturday morning, little has changed in Arizona. The excellent involuntary treatment law on Arizona’s books continues go largely ignored, and the state continues to distinguish itself as better only than Nevada in the number of hospital beds it provides for citizens in psychiatric crisis and the percentage of people with mental illness it jails rather than hospitalizes. Horror stories associated with untreated mental illness continue to emerge from the state with disgusting regularity, the Dec. 16 beating death of a mentally ill inmate in a Phoenix jail - while up to 18 officers reportedly watched - being among the latest but not the most gruesome.
A few years after Kendra Webdale’s death, a family member told the New York Times that Kendra's Law is "a wonderful legacy" that gives the family consolation.
In Arizona, there is no such legacy, only continued neglect of the deadly consequences of untreated severe mental illness. Christina Taylor Green, her family and all the others whose lives already have or will be ended or destroyed by the treatable disease of mental illness deserve better, and so do their communities.
(For more on Arizona's neglect, see "Dr. Torrey: Efforts to Treat Loughner Before His Rampage Likely Would Have Failed.")
