The story is just as sad on the other side of the desk. Funding has been cut so far the hospitals have a few percent of the beds they need, and not enough staff to treat even those. Non-emergency outpatient services are even worse. Most of these people are being kicked out on the street, where their illness and substance abuse will eventually leave them incarcerated, at best, at the hands of police who are radically untrained to deal with sick people.

You expect a schizophrenic man to argue to the judge that he shouldn't be committed because when he said he was going to shoot his kids with a shotgun, he didn't really mean it; you might not expect his perfectly sane court-appointed lawyer to pick through every detail of your records looking for a reason to let him out.

My mother called me last week upset nearly to tears by a phone call she'd had from a "doctor" employed by an insurance company, who was trying to argue that her patient's mania (which he knew nothing about) wasn't a serious enough medical problem for them to pay for treatment.

At this point she's planning to get out of clinical work; she wants to help people, but she feels like the system just isn't set up to let her make a difference.

We need to fix this a decade ago.