RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — State lawmakers are looking to overhaul North Carolina’s involuntary commitment system, saying it’s turned into a revolving door of people with mental illnesses cycling through courts, jails, and hospitals without getting the help they need.
The N.C. House on Wednesday voted 100-10 to pass a bill that seeks to strengthen outpatient treatment options, improve mental health evaluations for people involved in the criminal justice system and identify gaps in the state’s behavioral health system.
“We always say we don’t want to turn our hospitals into jails, but we also don’t want to turn our jails into hospitals,” said State Rep. Reece Pyrtle (R-Rockingham).
Involuntary commitment is a legal process where a judge orders a person to undergo a mental health evaluation, even if they don’t want one, because of concerns they could harm themselves or others.
The North Carolina House vote Wednesday on changes to involuntary commitment system. Photo by Shabnam Danesh/CBS 17
“Our detention centers and prisons are turning into mental health facilities de facto,” said State Rep. Renee Price (D-Orange).
The bill is the result of months of work by a House task force studying the intersection of mental health and public safety.
“The main provision of this bill is to create mechanisms to do evaluations for people who have mental illness to determine if they need to be admitted to the hospital or whether they can serve their time and have that adjudicated,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Timothy Reeder (R–Ayden).
But State Rep. Marcia Morey (D-Durham) disagreed.
“This bill does almost nothing except continue studies. If you read the first 10 sections, we continue to study and we direct different departments, DHHS, to study why you have staffing shortages. We know why they have staffing shortages. We’re not paying them enough,” she said.
Reeder acknowledged that the task force has a lot more work to do.
“It’s taken us 20 years to get the broken mental health system that we have. We’re not going to solve it in six months. This is a step forward that will be really focused on people who are criminally involved,” he said.
After the bill passed, N.C. Speaker Destin Hall released a statement, which is below:
“Recent tragedies like the preventable murder of Iryna Zarutska have exposed serious failures in our mental health and public safety systems that put all North Carolinians at risk. I’m proud of the work the committee has done to move this legislation forward. These changes will make our state safer by keeping dangerous criminals with mental illnesses off the streets and getting them the care they need before they can harm others.”
The bill now heads to the Senate.
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