EDITORIAL: Joint efforts needed to fix NM mental health system

Aug. 23--Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the quintuple homicide by John Hyde, a deadly rampage by a man with mental illness and a gun.

Last week a current and a retired Albuquerque Police Department officer were bound over for trial in the 2014 fatal shooting of James Boyd, a mentally ill man armed with knives who was camping illegally in the Sandia foothills.

And last week, if you were mentally ill and in crisis in the Albuquerque metro area, your options for getting lasting help were still slim to none.

What a difference a decade hasn't made.

New Mexico still doesn't have a version of Kendra's Law to balance public safety with civil liberties regarding those suffering from untreated mental illness. And so the Land of Enchantment remains an outlier when it comes to safeguarding some of its most vulnerable residents; it is one of just five states without a law allowing courts to order mental health outpatients who pose a danger to themselves or others to take medications.

New Mexico still doesn't allow its state or local law enforcement officers to arrest a mentally ill person in possession of a firearm if he or she is barred under current federal law from having one. Those officers have to work the bureaucracy and get federal agents to make an arrest.

And neither the state nor the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County metropolitan area has a cohesive, coherent system of dealing with mentally ill residents before, during or after they are in crisis.

And so even someone like Hyde, who was begging for help after his treatment was changed for the worse, is left with nowhere to turn.

When someone gets threatened or hurt, the current "system" suddenly wakes up. And when the mentally ill individual hurts or kills someone, or is hurt, killed or locked up, the hand-wringing starts regarding "how could this happen?"

Again.

This tragic pattern of circular finger-pointing to dodge/assign blame has gone on since at least 2006. This year Bernalillo County voters approved a $20 million dedicated treatment funding stream courtesy of taxpayers -- Note: funding stream in place, plan to come -- and Senate President Pro Tem Mary Kay Papen, D-Las Cruces, has vowed to try yet again to get a modified Kendra's Law through the Legislature.

But ensuring this and other reforms really work will take, as they say, a village.

The state, county, city of Albuquerque and myriad social service providers will have to abandon their turf battles and partner to create a unified system along the lines of the one a delegation of local folks on a trip organized by the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce observed earlier this year in Pima County. Tucson's one-stop shop serves about 1,000 adults and up to 300 children a month and includes a crisis response center, evaluation, referrals for follow-up services and even housing for people emerging from crisis and into treatment.

That beats the system of triage here, where in 2013 only 98,000 of an estimated 151,000 county residents requiring mental health treatment were served by local providers -- professionals who may or may not know what other help a client is getting or needs.

This summer a report issued by Community Partners Inc., an Arizona-based company hired by the county to help craft a spending plan, recommended the city, county and surrounding communities pool resources and coordinate behavioral health services in the area. Sadly, such collaboration may require a legislative solution, much like the ones that established the Middle Rio Grande Council of Governments and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.

And the 2016 New Mexico Legislature should pool its brainpower and empathy to craft laws that balance public safety and individual civil rights.

It needs to happen. There is little doubt that if New Mexico had those tools available to deal with the mentally ill 10 years ago and last year, John Hyde and his victims, and James Boyd and the officers charged with shooting him, would be better off this week.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.

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