Recognizing a need

The Mental Health Court program helps clients sort out the problems that landed them in trouble with the law.

When people with mental illness break the law, they make headlines.

In Idaho Falls and Ammon, there have been three extreme cases in little more than a year.

In September 2006, 33-year-old Craig Tanner set fire to his parents' home on Tasman Avenue, believing that going to jail was the only way to escape their influence.

In February, 28-year-old Leslie Brooke Watson drove her SUV across the icy Snake River and over the frozen falls near Broadway, endangering her 4-year-old daughter, who was luckily in a car seat.

In August, 25-year-old Reuben Diaz of Ammon stabbed his roommate with a Samurai sword, then jumped off a second-story balcony to elude police.

All three ended up in the criminal justice system.

Before 2002, these people would have been sent straight to jail, prison or State Hospital South in Blackfoot. But nowadays they are more likely to end up in the Mental Health Court program in Idaho Falls and Rexburg. (Tanner and Watson were both sent there as part of their sentencing. Diaz's case is still in the court system.)

Mental Health Court clients appear before a designated judge every two weeks for a review of their progress. They attend daily group counseling sessions, and have case workers who stop by daily to ensure they're taking their medications and staying clean.

Although Mental Health Court has the law to back it up, its goal is to give clients as much responsibility as they can handle. There are four stages of recovery, and graduation from one stage to the next is recognized with a certificate.

The program had help getting started from 7th District Judge Brent Moss of Rexburg, who recognized that the courts couldn't help people with mental illnesses.

Although Drug Court had been established in 2000 out of the realization that many crimes had their root cause in substance abuse, it became obvious in many cases that it was only the first layer of a bigger problem. Many of the people had mental illnesses and had been self-medicating with drugs and alcohol.

"You had a revolving door, the same problems over and over again," he said. "There were people who would get clean and sober and couldn't cope with their lives."

As they organized Mental Health Court, Moss and the people he was working with looked to the model already established by the Assertive Community Treatment program.

The ACT concept was first pioneered in the early 1970s. Under it, trained staffers work with patients to help them avoid crisis situations. The goal is to solve problems before people wind up in jail or in the hospital.

Mental Health Court arose from the recognition that people need the same kind of help after they get in trouble. At the time, there were only four such programs in the country.

Today, there are 35 people in Bonneville and Madison counties under the joint supervision of Health and Welfare and Probation and Parole.

"People who have mental illness still have the right to live their lives," Moss said. "The goal is to produce people who are stable enough to make informed decisions. We say to them, 'Here are choices you can make. We can't make them for you.'"

There is a debate going on in the mental health community about who should be more focused on the issue, Health and Welfare or the Department of Correction.

Rick Huber, a mental health advocate who suffers from schizophrenia, said that in many cases, by the time a person has committed a crime, it is almost too late to help.

"In Idaho, people are denied services until they become a problem and it can't be ignored any longer," he said. "The first few times they become ill, there's very rarely anything available. If people come in asking for help, you need to give it to them. Prison is expensive. Jail is expensive. What I find so sad is that it's just a waste of a life."

Still, there is a role for corrections in the treatment of mentally ill people, said Eric Olson, who supervises Mental Health Court in Region VII.

"They're already in jail and prison," he said. "We might as well get them treatment. We've got to help partnering."