To the editor:

I was interested in Rud Turnbull’s commentary “Mental health challenges remain” and his relationship with the Bazelon Center, whose Web site I have visited in the past. The center is right to be troubled by the criminalization of the mentally ill.

I’m not sure if the general public is aware of how sadly serious this problem is. A recent issue of Time magazine reported there are an estimated 370,000 mentally ill people in U.S. prisons, nearly 1 in 5 inmates, and 80,000 patients in mental hospitals in the United States. Surely, something is wrong with this picture! How can we knowingly house our mentally ill in prisons instead of hospitals?

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, an expert on serious mental illness, has called the closing of mental health hospitals “a well intentioned disaster.” It seems to me the numbers quoted above bears this out.

There is hope — the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the Judge Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and the National Mental Health Assn. have joined together and have founded “The Campaign for Mental Health Reform.” Changes certainly need to be made to our current mental health system.

One certainly should make every effort to support this campaign and any other group or person who helps the mentally ill. We also need to tell our stories to help dispel the myths and present the realities of these devastating illnesses. If we do this, eventually people will begin to understand what we are saying and will join in our support of the mentally ill.

Doretta “Sally” Van Tassel,

Lawrence