When someone says they have the right to refuse help, but they're clearly in the middle of psychosis or severe mental illness, are they truly capable of making that decision? And if not, how do we ethically step in without being seen as taking their rights away, but instead as trying to save their life?

You know, there is power of attorneys which can be used for mental health, and you could, for those people, you could say, "Look, while you're competent to make decisions, you can fill out this power of attorney, and you can define who is going to be your care provider, and you can define what kind of treatment you'll accept, and you can take yourself out." Now, that'll take yourself out to a point.

Uh, it won't take you out in case you become, uh, violent and actually dangerous to other people, but it'll take you out if you're at risk of harm.

Now, there's someone in the Carolinas that's come up with that form, but it hasn't worked so far.

So I was going to say that we need policies that are going to change from a standard of neglect to a standard of true care, and also to treat psychosis as a medical emergency it is.

Well, I'm on the civil justice side.

And so I would urge policymakers across the country to adopt the four principles adopted by the National Judicial Task Force back in 2022.

That begins with, first, having earlier intervention before someone is in crisis, before someone needs hospitalisation.

From your experience, is that really the case? How are courts beginning to recognize and respond to it as a central challenge? Do you see the court starting to prioritize it in terms of strategy and resources?

You know, I think we might even be underestimating the public interest in this area.

A couple years ago, the Michigan Supreme Court decided to set up a strategic planning process, and in that process, we did a survey of our internal users, our external users, and gave them 20 problems.

And the internal, the external and internal users all identified mental illness and substance abuse as the number one issue affecting the courts.

So Michigan Supreme Court said, "Okay, our number one strategic priority for next year is behavioral health." We hired a behavioral health administrator, which was one of the recommendations of the national task force, and more states are doing that now.

I know Illinois did.

I assume Arizona has.

How do we fix that disconnect? How do we get both sides, House and Senate, working together so when there's clear, broad support for something this important, it actually moves forward?

The court-ordered treatment doesn't, at least in Maricopa County, doesn't involve the judge, and it only requires like a, a report to be submitted to the judge, but it doesn't put anybody in front of the judge, and it doesn't create any accountability for our clinics.

And what you, what you need is the judge involved from beginning to end when the petition is filed.

So we measure now when we get someone who comes in for a pick-up order to have their loved one transported to the hospital for, uh, an evaluation, we measure how many petitions we get after that.

We're running around 25%.

So what happens to the other 75%? We don't have the answer to that yet.

But so we're the front end.

We make sure that the deferment process is followed.

But if you have a brain attack, [laughs] forget it.