Judge Milton Mack

There is a challenge, though.

Implementation is a big deal.

So in the 50s, it was one-stop shopping.

A person was committed to a facility, and that facility provided all the services the person could possibly need.

Well, now, that's not the case.

Now you're in the community.

So now we have stakeholders that all have an interest.

Law enforcement is a stakeholder.

The hospital, the emergency department, the...

community treatment system, the court, families, and other schools and so forth.

All these stakeholders, and we have all the makings of a mental health system, but the stakeholders don't communicate with one another.

They don't work together.

They don't have warm handoffs one place to the next.

And so it just hasn't been working.

So in Michigan, what we found was after these laws were adopted, a lot of the hospitals weren't complying with the laws, and neither were the community treatment agencies, and neither were the courts.

So we're changing the culture, and that's huge.

Changing the culture of an organization is hard to do.

The culture has been we don't give people treatment they don't want, even if they don't have the ability to make that decision.

So...

We're changing that.