I just read today that our state is considering passing a bill that would make it easier to put people in mental institutions against their will.

The legislation would make it easier to detain dangerous mentally ill people under the state's controversial Involuntary Treatment Act by broadening the criteria for holding them against their will. One key revision: The current threshold, which requires that they pose an "imminent likelihood" of harm to self or others, would be lowered to a "substantial" likelihood of harm.

Washington ranks at or near the bottom of states in number of local psychiatric beds per 100,000 population, experts say. But because earlier treatment might help stabilize people more quickly, beds may open up sooner, Dagadakis said. "Nobody really knows how things will play out."

There have been instances in the state when people were not admitted and did either take someone else’s life or their own, but as a Bipolar patient, I can see the problems with setting the bar lower. Even without taking the fact into consideration that there will more than likely be a shortage of beds, there are other reasons to question this law, which was passed with good intentions, but at the cost of civil liberties to the mentally ill.

When I consider some of the patients I have met in mental institutions, there have definitely been more than a few who seemed as if they would not be a harm to others or themselves who were not necessarily being helped by the treatment. One young college student that stands out in mind was (according to her) committed to the hospital by her parents because she wanted to buy a Volkswagen bus and take a cross-country road trip. She was committed in the state, under the existing law, was not suicidal, was not homicidal, and was able to talk to me clearly about what happened.

Clearly, she was not a danger to herself or to anyone around her. If taking a cross-country trip in a van were really a “threat to society”,  about a tenth of college students across the country would be “committed.  Making it easier to commit people to mental institutions will more than likely not have a significant influence on violent crime in the community, but it does infringe on the rights of the mentally ill.

There are other ways to take care of mentally ill patients which are much more beneficial in the long run. In Australia, for example, there is a program where Psychiatric Nurses make house visits to mentally ill patients to teach them the skills necessary to keep them out of the hospital and to remain functioning members of society.

Our state already has a program to deal with mentally ill violent offenders due to their high recidivism rate after being released from prison, which was passed in 1999, which on first glance seems similar to Australia’s policies.