Seattle Faces Backlash After Easing on Crimes Involving Mental Illness
The criminal justice system should not handle these cases. I don&#x27;t consider acts done by mentally ill people criminal. I have personal experience with this.<p>My sister is bipolar and schizophrenic. For 30 years she was a little quirky, but mostly normal. She worked at a private equity firm in New York, got married, had a great life. Something changed around age 30. She started acting strange. We initially thought it was just her normal quirkyness, but then things started to escalate. She wouldn&#x27;t stop talking about Prince Harry. She said she wanted to marry him. We laughed it off.<p>Then she started talking about secret messages she was receiving from Prince Harry. She believed she had been chosen as the princess and that ISIS was trying to kill her to prevent Prince Harry from marrying her. She had all this proof (hidden messages in the news, Instagram posts of bananas, crazy stuff). She was convince that the government had put chips in our brains and were controlling us. We realized that she needed help, but she refused to believe she had a mental illness. There was absolutely nothing we could do BEFORE she committed a crime. We knew it would happen, we knew it was only a matter of time, but the criminal justice system would not do anything.<p>Finally, on Christmas day, she went on a rampage at my grandmas house and destroyed a bunch of property. (We found a journal entry later where she said she was sad because Santa Clause didn&#x27;t come and pick her up and take her to the North Pole like he was supposed to so she lost it.) We got lucky that it was only property. She was put in jail for 24 hours and then let out on the street at midnight without us knowing. She assaulted a police officer the next day. She thought he was ISIS trying to kill her.<p>FINALLY, the criminal justice system did something. We had to hire lawyers to plead with the judge to force her on to medication. We had stacks of tweets, facebook messages, emails, etc that showed she was clearly delusional. They finally agreed.<p>She is on meds now and has regular checkins with her parole officer to ensure she stays on them. She is back to being a little quirky, but has no more delusions. She has a job again and is happy.<p>We are lucky. It could have ended up a lot worse. The current system for helping the mentally ill is totally broken.