Would more money for mental health have kept Seattle man out of tree?

When Seattle’s now infamous “Man in Tree” was drawing worldwide attention for refusing to come down from the 80-foot downtown Sequoia last week, many made light of it.

But for his mother and mental health professionals, it was far from a laughing matter.

And as she speaks out about her struggles with her troubled son, others say it just further underscores the desperate need for far more services.

Listen: #ManInTree underscores mental health crisis

“He’s obviously sick,” Lisa Gossett told The Seattle Times after watching the downtown tree drama unfold on TV from her home in Alaska.

She said her son, 28-year-old Cody Miller had been a “regular” kid with A.D.D. who started seeming “off” in his late teens or early 20’s.

She didn’t know the early signs of mental illness. Gossett is far from alone.

“It just breaks my heart to read things where she said I didn’t know it was mental illness at first,” said Ashley Fontaine, the director of the Seattle chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“We hear that all the time and I think it is an abysmal commentary on our failures as a society to really include mental health in the overall health picture,” she said.

After all, millions have been spent to educate on everything from recognizing heart attacks to early breast cancer detection.

And Fontaine says early intervention is proving to be key in mental illness treatment.

“Unfortunately for a lot of people, when mental health symptoms first appear and they go on untreated they do tend to be progressive,” Fontaine said.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

A number of states including Oregon are pioneering early intervention programs.

“If you intervene early the ability for someone to recover and have a fulfilling life, where they’re able to be part of their community, where they’re able to be employed…if the intervention is there, the ability for them to do that is much, much higher,” she said.

State lawmakers approved millions of additional dollars for mental health services in the new budget passed this week.

But our state has devoted much of its limited resources to funding crisis care over longer term treatment programs.

Fontaine argues that’s shortsighted and ultimately far more costly, and could prevent some acute incidents like the man in the tree.

She says the needs also include more spending to stem a serious shortage of mental health providers, many of whom make subsistence salaries despite the demands of the job.

Another big issue raised by the man in the tree – involuntary commitment. It’s still extremely difficult to detain someone in psychiatric care against their will. They have to be determined to be an imminent danger to themselves or others.

“Because of course we want to preserve people’s individual civil rights to choose whether or not that particular treatment is for them and we don’t want to step on that,” Fontaine said. “But at the same time, we work with a lot of families who have felt like they’re just left with nothing.”

In the meantime, the National Alliance on Mental Illness continues providing numerous programs and services, from counseling for families trying to navigate the system to education and lobbying for increased funding for mental health care.

And Fontaine hopes one day, it won’t take an incident like the man in the tree to draw more attention to such a pressing public health crisis.