Months before Myron May opened fire on students in a Florida State University (FSU) library, his closest friends made three unsuccessful attempts to admit the troubled lawyer and FSU alumnus into a mental health clinic, even as he spoke about the voices in his head and mentioned plans to purchase a gun.
According to May’s friends’ accounts in the Tampa Bay Times, law enforcement officials either ignored or laughed at May’s pleas for help in the months before he shot three people at FSU and was killed by police. Sessions with May’s psychologist also didn’t help; after a one-hour appointment, he was deemed fine and continued to receive the medication that caused his paranoia.
May’s friends later reached the height of their frustration when staff at Mesilla Valley Hospital in New Mexico told them that even in his psychotic state, they couldn’t take May. Instead, he would have to seek their services on his own accord.
“You have to commit a crime to get the help you need. Why isn’t it the reverse?” said Kimberly Snagg, a Houston lawyer who described May as one of her best friends, told the Tampa Bay Times. “This could have been avoided. The entire thing.”
According to a survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), less than 30 percent of the 61 million Americans who have a mental illness get connected to inpatient medical services. The issue has remained prevalent, especially in rural parts of the country, which account for more than 85 percent of the land that the federal government designates as “mental health professional shortage areas.”
Since the Reagan administration deinstitutionalized mental health care in the 1980s, resources have diverted from community clinics to correctional facilities. As a result, few state mental health facilities meet the 50 beds per 100,000 people minimum, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. Prisons have also turned into de-facto mental health facilities, with the mentally ill accounting for 70 percent of the population.
While officials have tried to be proactive helping the mentally ill before they get in contact with the criminal justice system, some officers admit it’s hard to carry out that mission because they’re trained to not react too aggressively and avoid arresting those suffering from psychotic episodes. These tactics, while well meaning, often prevent law enforcement from intervening and including mental health professionals in discussions about how to treat the person in question.
When it comes to local mental health clinics, the likelihood of danger to self and others doesn’t serve as a viable prerequisite for admission. Laws on the book in nearly half of the states say that the mentally ill have to be deemed “imminently dangerous” before they can receive involuntary inpatient mental health care. That’s why people who exhibit signs of psychiatric disorders aren’t admitted into local clinics, even with appeals from friends and family. The few who receive services are often discharged prematurely without a treatment plan.
There are other recent examples of the failure to connect people with mental health services before tragedy strikes.
Three weeks before he killed six people and injured 13 others before committing suicide, officers who interviewed Eliot Rodgers at his apartment determined that he didn’t meet the criteria for involuntary admission into a mental facility. In Rodger’s Manifesto that later surfaced, he expressed his plans to kill, and said the officers would have found his guns upon further inspection of his room.
And shortly after his 24-year old son stabbed him and committed suicide, Virginia Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) said a breakdown in communication between the state’s Community Services Board and regional mental health facilities prevented him from treating his son Gus Deeds. Two days before the incident, the older Deeds tried to admit his son to a clinic for psychiatric care but officials said they couldn’t admit Gus because of a bed shortage. Days later, Deeds found out that wasn’t the case.
“It seems inconvenient for those people to provide services here,” Deeds wrote in an email. “I have heard from people in Rockbridge about lack of services, too, so I think there may be a bigger problem here. I am alive for a reason, and I will work for change. I owe that to my precious son.”
Change may be on the horizon, but only if Congress gets its act together. Earlier this year, Reps. Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Ron Barber (D-AZ) introduced bills that aim to strengthen the mental health care system and connect people to the care they need. Both pieces of legislation allocate funds that divert mentally ill people from correctional facilities, provide more funding for school-based mental health services, protect the access to psychiatric medication in Medicaid and Medicare, improve health information technology for mental health records, and promote more integration of mental and physical health care.
Murphy’s bill in particular contains provisions that would make the receipt of funds from mental health block grants contingent on states expanding their civil commitment — a process by which courts order severely mentally ill people to receive psychiatric treatment. The bill would also strengthen oversight of SAMHSA, change the relationship between caregivers and patients’ families as outlined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and allow psychiatric treatment in hospitals through Medicaid.
Although Barber and Murphy’s bills bear some similarity, a highly polarized Congress threatens any chance of lawmakers reaching consensus on how an effective mental health care system would look. For people like Myron May’s friends, that means that law enforcement and hospital administrators may continue to ignore the warning signs until it’s too late.