'Mental health' court gives alternative to jail

ST. LOUIS -- Modeled after one in New York City, a nearly year-old "mental health" court here that dispenses counseling and supervision for the mentally impaired offers an alternative to jail time unlikely to help them, officials say.

"The goal of the mental health court is to reduce repeat offenders and make them take part in court-monitored treatment. We're trying to link them with services," said James Sullivan, the St. Louis administrative judge in charge of the no-frills court convened each Thursday morning.

Since the court opened here in January, about 100 people have been referred to Sullivan. Defendants return every two to four weeks for progress checks with the judge who also gets blunt assessments by their social workers.

In 1998, then-Mayor Clarence Harmon proposed the city's specialty courts to deal with narrow issues such as mental health, drug abuse crimes and truancy.

Susan Anderson was with the Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corp. when she joined a local contingent in visiting New York for a look at "quality of life" courts started there in the 1990s. To her, the key was giving judges as much information as possible.

"If you cannot see that this person has been brought in several times before for the same type of behavior, you're operating in the dark," she said. "Not doing that isn't helping the person or the community.

"If we address that problem when it's small, we save that person, that person's family, society and taxpayers. We save the cost of when that person commits a major crime, the heartache, the whole nine yards."

In a study published this year, the New York-based Center for Court Innovation said one reason for the growth of mental health courts -- in Seattle, Indianapolis, Washington and more than a dozen other cities -- is the move of patients out of mental hospitals.

In recent years, the study said, the nation's focus has been to treat mentally ill people in less restrictive ways. "One unintended consequence of this shift in public policy has been that it has become far more difficult for many people with mental illness to access the mental health system," the study's two authors wrote.