To the editor:

My thanks to the J-W and Dave Ranney for the informative and revealing feature story on our own small city’s homeless/mentally ill. Sheriff Trapp is absolutely correct in saying jail is not the solution.

There are ways we can help people like Mr. Gilmore, beginning with changing the so-called mental health civil liberties laws (put in place with good intentions to prevent non-mentally ill persons from commitment to mental hospitals) which unfortunately severely limits one’s ability to intervene with help/treatment for a friend or family loved one.

Those of us who advocate changing laws to allow intervention with help/treatment for the mentally ill would agree with the title of an essay by Hershel Hardin, “Uncivil Liberties: Far From Respecting Civil Liberties, Legal Obstacles to Treating the Mentally Ill Limit or Destroy the Liberty of the Person.”

And for your contemplation and mine is the following quote from the April 14, 2002, Los Angeles Times: “Imagine a train wreck that scatters passengers across the landscape. Paramedics arrive and begin loading the injured onto stretchers — but when anyone screams out in pain, “No! Don’t touch me!” the medics nod compassionately and leave the person sprawled amid the rocks and cactuses.

A similar scene has been unfolding on the urban landscape for the last 40 years. People with severe mental illness, tossed from state hospitals, have landed on public sidewalks and in wretched urban encampments. And no one helps because they say they don’t want help.”

Doretta “Sally” Van Tassel,

Lawrence