Mental illness summit a missed opportunity: Column

• Session was prompted by last year%27s Newtown massacre%2C but tragedy was not discussed.
• No police officers%2C correctional officers%2C probation officers or judges spoke at the gathering.
• Best way to reduce stigma is not by ignoring discussions about violence committed by a few.

President Obama deserves credit for hosting a White House summit on mental health on Monday, but the White House forgot to invite the people who arguably deal daily with more mentally ill persons than anyone else.

No police officers, sheriff's deputies, correctional officers, probation officers or judges spoke at the summit. No high ranking Justice Department official attended. Nor was there any detailed mention by the president or his hand-picked speakers about the recent mass murders in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Tucson or on the Virginia Tech campus committed by young men with diagnosed mental disorders.

Given that the summit was prompted by last December's Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the aversion by the White House to actually discuss that shooting is disheartening.

By the federal government's own admission, more than 360,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are currently incarcerated in American jails and prisons. More than a half million are on probation. More than a million go through our criminal justice system each year. The largest public mental facility in our nation is -- not a treatment center -- it is reputably the Los Angeles County jail.

How could the White House ignore these troubling statistics at a mental health summit or the frightening reality that our jails and prisons are today's de facto mental asylums? How could law enforcement and criminal justice officials be excluded from conversations about how to reform our mental health care system? How could a presidential summit be held without anyone talking in detail about the mass killings that made it necessary?

Instead of addressing these unpleasant issues, President Obama spoke about the need to stop stigmatizing persons with mental illnesses, noting that 60% of Americans with mental illnesses do not receive treatment, often because they are embarrassed or afraid of being ostracized.

As the father of an adult son with a severe mental illness, I have witnessed first-hand how painful stigma has made his life. I'm also aware that it wasn't embarrassment or stigma that kept him from getting help.

When my son became psychotic, I rushed him to a hospital emergency room in Fairfax County, Va., but was turned away because my son was not considered sick enough. Even though he had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness a year earlier, wasn't taking his medication, and was talking about suicide, I was told there was nothing I could do until he actually hurt himself, someone else or me. Forty-eight hours later, he broke into an unoccupied house to take a bubble bath, was arrested and charged with two felonies.

Those felonies increased the stigma against him a hundred-fold.

The legal obstacles that I faced are not unique. There were abundant warning signs before the mass killings on the Virginia Tech campus and in Tucson, but parents and college officials felt their hands were tied by current laws.

A House investigative subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., has held three recent hearings to examine mental illness and violence post-Newtown. As President Obama did in his summit remarks, subcommittee members have emphasized that a majority of persons with mental illnesses are not violent and that persons with mental disorders are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators. Rep. Murphy's subcommittee, however, has not ignored the elephant in the room.

I testified at the subcommittee's first hearing, which examined reasons families can't get decent mental health care. Another witness described how his son slashed his own throat, dug a grave in the backyard and showed friends nooses that he'd made to hang himself, yet his parents' pleas went unheeded as soon as the family's insurance company refused to pay for additional days in a hospital. Discharged, their son killed himself. A second subcommittee hearing examined how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act tragically kept psychiatrists from warning parents that their son was suicidal.

Last month, Murphy's subcommittee exposed how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), our government's leading agency charged with addressing mental health problems, ignores serious mental illnesses in favor of more popular substance abuse programs.

SAMHSA's three-year plan defining its priorities -- a 41,804 page document -- doesn't even mention the words schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, our nation's two most serious mental illnesses. The $3.5 billion agency has only one psychiatrist on its 574 member staff and his expertise is substance abuse, not mental illness.

Meanwhile, SAMHSA spent $80,000 on a musical that featured dancers singing the song, Red Red Wine, to warn its own employees about the dangers of substance and alcohol abuse.

I'm grateful that President Obama is using the White House to shine a spotlight on mental health, but the best way to reduce stigma is not by ignoring discussions about violence committed by a few or ignoring our sons and daughters who are incarcerated for committing crimes linked to their illnesses.

Pete Earley is the author of CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness.

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