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Andrew Goldstein. Russell Weston. And now Olga Maisonet. More and more names of alleged perpetrators who acted violently supposedly because of their mental illness. The headlines heralded a new mission for government -- protecting society from dangerous people in the throes of their mental illnesses. The greatest example of this new wave of criminal consciousness is the plan to create a law that allows for Involuntary Outpatient Commitment (IOC) for people living with mental illnesses.

In the eyes of the most cynical, this IOC legislation confirms what many have suspected all along; the public's commitment to serving people living with psychiatric diagnoses only begins at the point that the public feels threatened by those same people in need of services. The knees then jerk towards having those people committed.

How did we get to this point? Well, forty years of deinstitutionalization, with nearly 80,000 people leaving state psychiatric facilities before the first dollar followed them home was the beginning. This was followed by the adoption of a great measure called the Community Mental Health Reinvestment Act, which was meant to guarantee that money flowed from the hospitals to the communities, as people returned home. Yet, even that great law, adopted in 1993, unfortunately after the proverbial barn was mostly empty, has been shortchanged to the tune of $80 million.

Earlier this year, a newly elected Attorney General fell into the middle of a political and media firefight, driven by a newspaper, the New York Post (which often wonders in print if NYC Mayor Rudolph Guiliani is tough enough), that threatened to taint the Attorney General's tenure before the ink was dry on his oath of office.

In high stake politics, the answer to virtually any crisis is "do something," and a draconian measure was pulled together. To his credit, Attorney General Spitzer recognized that it was a work in progress, and invited organizations like MHANYS to give input into the measure. While we informed his office we could not support IOC, he quickly recognized and adopted as central to the mission our goals of presumptive Medicaid eligibility, right to counsel and criminal penalties for falsely petitioning a person to IOC. Those measures were all included in the bill announced this week, although there are some concerns regarding right to counsel.

One thing the Attorney General cannot do, however, is have any real impact on budget provisions other than his own in the Department of Law. It was distressing to watch the Speaker of the Assembly standing in front of a microphone, proud of the four million new dollars proposed to meet the needs of people living with mental illnesses, realizing that he knows full well that Reinvestment has been shortchanged $80 million, and that the services required to meet the standards of this legislation would require hundreds of millions of new dollars. And, no matter what the Senate proposal looks like when it ultimately appears, the five million dollars they've put on the table is nowhere near enough.

Thus the failure to commit the necessary funding has led to an effort to involuntarily commit the underserved. Call it by any name you choose, but, in this bill, assisted treatment is still treatment at needlepoint.

At the news conference introducing the Assembly bill, the most poignant remarks came from Nadine Stevens, whose son was fatally shot by NYC police after brandishing a samurai sword. Choking back tears, Mrs. Stevens expressed her support for IOC in terms of the failure of the system to properly serve her son. "The only thing we had is the shelter," she said. The gap between "the shelter" and involuntary commitment is broad, and there has been no real effort to bridge it. It is flabbergasting to think that one of the proposed solutions to this problem is mandatory intensive case management, when advocates have been fighting for funding for existing case management, to no avail.

Fixing the existing system will go a long way toward addressing the concerns that make the political knees jerk. Fully funding services is a cornerstone of what must be built. If there must be an outpatient commitment law in this state, humanity and reason dictate that it should have one basis: Our system of care should be so good and so appropriately funded that no one is ever subjected to involuntary commitment.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton (actually James Carville), "It's the treatment, stupid." The lack of available services, housing and supports means that a law establishing involuntary outpatient commitment is creating compulsory participation in something that does not exist.

For politicians in New York State, adopting outpatient commitment would mean great headlines and failed public policy.