(July 20, 2013) One year ago today, 12 people died and 70 more were wounded in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater when a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia opened fire on an audience at the midnight opening of The Dark Knight.
In the months that followed, additional mass killings associated with mental illness took lives in Michigan, Texas, California and – at the end of the year at Sandy Hook Elementary School – in Connecticut.
In the collective national grief that followed, state and federal lawmakers focused more attention on mental illness treatment issues than they had in the half-century since passage of the Mental Health Act of 1963.
In Nevada, a law was enacted so that Nevadans trapped in the revolving door of non-treatment consequences at last would have the option of court-ordered outpatient treatment (AOT) to help them live safely in the community. In Colorado, New York, Texas, Montana, Indiana, Washington and elsewhere, treatment law improvements were made that will assist more people who struggle to stay in treatment. Bills to make improvements are pending in states where legislatures are still in session, including California and Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, policymakers like Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) turned a spotlight to federal policies that create barriers to treatment for those with the most severe mental illness –holding hearings, grilling federal officials and at least talking about change.
All this attention and the reforms that have resulted are welcome – but they are not enough.
Millions of Americans live with untreated severe mental illness every single day. Hundreds of thousands are behind bars or living on the streets because of their symptoms. Tens of thousands are victimized or kill themselves every single year.
On behalf of them all – and of the past and future victims of preventable tragedies like the one in Aurora – we must not rest on a year of milestones. As long as barriers to treatment remain, the drive must continue to improve and use the laws that exist to help those too ill to help themselves must continue.
In the meantime, we continue to mourn with the rest of the nation the lives lost and hurt that treatment before tragedy might have spared.
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