GWEN IFILL:
Now we explore some of the questions about mental health care with three who work in the field, Dr. Anthony Lehman, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Bonnie Sultan, a sociologist with the Center for crime prevention and control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and Brian Stettin, policy director for the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that lobbies to remove legal barriers for mental health treatment.
Welcome to you all. Dr. Lehman, did the system fail?
DR. ANTHONY LEHMAN, University of Maryland School of Medicine:Well, I think we have to say it has.
Unfortunately, at least what we have heard so far about this man is it's an all-too-familiar story.As I understand, he began having problems as early as high school, dropped out of high school, and was identified as someone who was having problems, and then proceeded in some of the history that we just heard about with involvement with the police and problems in college, but never received, I guess as best we know, any mental health treatment.
We also heard the unfortunate comments of his family, his parents, who seemed to be confused about what was going on.And that part of the story here is all too familiar about the failures of mental health systems to respond to young people with serious mental illness.What, of course, is not typical is to result in this kind of violence.
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