Virginia examines mental health care system New urgency on commitment laws following Virginia Tech shooting

RICHMOND, Virginia - A commission created to study Virginia's mental health system will examine the criteria used to force treatment of mentally unstable people — a topic that has invited scrutiny since a deadly shooting spree at a state university.

Virginia's involuntary commitment laws are among several issues a special mental health commission of the Supreme Court of Virginia plans to tackle at a meeting Friday. The Commission on Mental Health Law Reform was created last year and has been working on a mental health reform package for the state's 2008 legislative session.

The topic gained urgency in April, after Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty at Tech before taking his own life. Cho had been ordered into involuntary outpatient treatment in 2005, after a special justice found that he presented "an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness."

"What's ridiculous about this is we're talking about changing the bar to let people intervene and put them into treatment," Earley said. "Just by lowering the standard a little doesn't mean that someone's going to be abandoned for years and years in an institution."

But others on the task force are concerned that changing the standard will infringe on people's civil rights and lead to warehousing of the mentally ill, Earley said.

Mark Bodner, a special justice who heads up the commitment task force, said he and two other judges in Fairfax, just south of Washington, D.C., handle between 650 and 700 involuntary commitment cases each year. He said the current commitment language has not been a problem.

"I think the standard works well," Bodner said. "To me, the language demonstrates the gravity of the situation."

University of Virginia law professor Richard Bonnie, who chairs the commission, said the panel also plans to focus on facilitating psychiatric advance directives — legal documents the mentally ill draft to determine how they would like to be treated if they are ever committed involuntarily.