Your newspaper has performed an exceptional public service over the past year by highlighting issues that profoundly affect individuals with disabilities and their families.

I refer in particular to your coverage of the disability-motivated hate-crime attack on a young man by boys of his own age, the “waiting-list” crisis in the state’s Medicaid program, the consequences of the closure of the Lawrence Memorial Hospital mental health in-patient service and the dilemma of being caught in the criminal justice system after the closure of state institutions.

These stories should draw the attention of state and local policy leaders to several overriding issues and related challenges and opportunities: 1) coercion through civil commitment and the rights of people to refuse treatment and to have health-care providers honor advanced directives, including those related to palliative care at the end of life; 2) de-institutionalization and the failure to put teeth behind the integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act; 3) rights in the community, particularly access to public services, housing, income support, employment, and voting; 4) health services, insufficient funding of the services, the risk to mental health parity laws, and the power of managed care entities to shape treatment regimens; 5) the insufficiency of community-based, school-related mental health services; and 6) the dilemma that many families face, whether to forego services or surrender custody of their children to the state in order to secure services for a person who is now the state’s ward.

The Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the nation’s oldest public interest law firm in the field of disability, offers model statutes, technical assistance, litigation and legislative advocacy to guide state and local policy makers on these issues.

In particular, we at the Bazelon Center are deeply troubled by the criminalization of people who have mental health challenges and behaviors that are manifestations of those challenges. Your story (May 3, “Mental health reform left holes in safety net”) illustrates the challenges related to criminalization.

The policies we advocate can prevent Ed, Robert and Beth Shipp from facing the dilemma of a father testifying against son in order to secure a place for his son — a state prison — where some services may be available to him but where he will join an increasingly large population of people who have mental illness and have been criminalized instead of treated effectively in their communities.

Rud Turnbull is chairman of the board of trustees of the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and codirector of the Beach Center of Disability at Kansas University.