The number of civil mental health commitment cases has increased dramatically over the past two decades.

In this episode of Before You Go…, host Keith Morris of The Blum Firm welcomes colleague Lynn Waller Kelly, a former Associate Judge for one of the Tarrant County probate courts. Judge Kelly is now also a partner at The Blum Law Firm whose current practice focuses on representing clients in probate matters, estate litigation, and guardianship proceedings throughout North Texas. She also serves as a mediator in contested probate litigation matters.

Tune in to hear Keith and Judge Kelly talk about navigating the involuntary commitment system in Texas, including how the system works and misconceptions about the system. Judge Kelly also addresses a frequently asked question concerning the “public records of a private nature” once someone has been in the mental health court system.

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Don't let your final farewell stir up family feuds. Welcome to Before You Go, a podcast brought to you by Texas estate trust and guardianship attorneys, Stacy Kelly and Keith Morris. Preserve your hard-earned legacy. Be in the know.

Hello and welcome to Before You Go. This is our fourth episode, and today we're going to talk about navigating the Texas mental health system. We have our special guest, former Judge Lynn Kelly, who's now my partner at The Blum Firm and she's on to help us talk about this particular issue. And today, unfortunately, Stacy is under the weather, so you just got me and Judge Kelly today. I'll let her introduce herself and just tell us a little bit about her experience on the bench and both in practice.

All right, thank you. Good morning, Keith. I appreciate being one of your first guests on this very interesting and helpful podcast. I was honored to join The Blum firm and so I'm working with Keith and Stacy Kelly. I joined them back in January after almost six years on the bench here in Fort Worth in Tarrant County. I was an associate judge for one of the Tarrant County probate courts. We have two courts, and as part of that docket, actually the largest part of my docket was the civil mental health commitment docket. So I'm excited to share some of what I learned, not only as a judge of that docket, but for several years proceeding taking the bench. I also represented persons who had mental health commitment proceedings against them. I know Keith has done some of that work in the past as well.

It's become a growing problem these days with mental health issues it seems even now. I started doing mental health commitment dockets probably 20 years ago, and I saw the numbers creep up dramatically over time. There is a system in place in Texas in order to assist families with dealing with people that have basically emergent issues and preventing them from being in a situation where they have no help. My experience was in Harris County, but yours was in Tarrant County. I know that for the most part, the system, at least the law is the same, but there are differences in how the system is run. And so why don't you just give a brief overview of how the involuntary commitment system in Texas works?

Okay. So as you said, it's really intended to help people who are in acute crisis. And so the law that governs it is found in the Texas Health and Safety Code. It's also referred to as the Texas Mental Health Code and it gives law in this area. It provides that a person who is suffering from mental illness and that is defined with certain exceptions, that person can be committed to an inpatient mental health facility if the person poses a substantial risk of harm to themself or others. And then there's one other more narrow way to get the civil commitment, and that is if a person cannot take care of their activities of daily living, they are so incapacitated due to their mental illness that they can't make rational informed medical treatment decisions or take care of themselves.

In this civil commitment, if one is granted by a court having jurisdiction over the civil commitments, it can be up for a period of 90 days under a very limited circumstance that can be extended for a period of up to a year. But most of these we're talking 90 days or less, and honestly, in the big cities due to a lack of psychiatric beds and a lack of beds at the state mental hospitals, most of these people are going to be discharged much sooner than 90 days. We're really just talking about two or three weeks.

Yeah, and it was affectionately referred to in Houston as catch and release because we had... Harris County has probably, I don't know, 25 or 30 inpatient facilities. But then in terms of the long-term facilities, Rusk is one of the bigger ones and there are a couple other ones. What the doctors would tell us is that they don't really have beds there available, and so unless someone was just severe, severe, severe, then once their two to three weeks was up, then they were out. And then it turns into a cycle where a month or two later or sometimes even a couple of days later, they're back in again, right? I mean that happens frequently.

Yes. And I'll tell you as a judge, that was one of the most disheartening things was to see a person who would come back so frequently that I would recognize. I would know who they were by their name or by their face in the courtroom. So in Tarrant County when I was on the bench, we would have approximately 4,000 filings a year on this docket. That is divided between the two courts and of course in a larger area like Harris County, I'm sure that the volume was much higher than that.

Yeah, I think in Harris County, both Probate Court 3 and 4 are tasked with the mental health commitments and the associate judges handle the final hearings. The preliminary hearings, probable cause hearings are done by the JPs that are local out there. When I would do it, I would have somewhere between 100 and 120, sometimes as high as 160 people but that's just one ad litem. And I was usually for Court 4, so Court 3 had another person and we each got... The Court 4 got the people with the even numbers, and Court 3 got the people with the odd numbers. So the other ad litem would have just as many as I would, and they scheduled out the probable cause and the final hearings said that because the courtroom in Harris County, at least when I was doing it, was at Harris County Psychiatric Center, which is near the medical center in Houston.

The courtroom was actually in Harris County Psychiatric Center. They had a little office there for the ad litems, but we'd frequently run into the one from the other court and one of the dockets would be on Friday and one would be on Monday. There was a lot of folks, and it was very sad over the 15 years that I did it, I'd do it twice a year. I frequently got the holiday dockets when there were a lot of people. One of the things that happens that you and I talked about before was sometimes people, and we'll get into how you actually do it in a few minutes, but a lot of times family members would figure out how to get someone involuntarily committed and they would use involuntary commitment system as a way to get rid of a relative that was difficult during the holidays.

And so Aunt Irma, who's quirky and always says the inappropriate thing at dinner table at Christmas would end up spending her Christmas in an HCPC or one of the other facilities because they could be held for 72 hours. Some would figure out that she was just weird, not mentally ill, and then she'd get released at or near her probable cause hearing. So tell everybody what the process is, who is able to start the process of involuntary commitment. In Harris County typically, the sheriffs would do it if they saw somebody that was out running around in traffic or whatever, or family members would come down and then explain the timeframes and the types of hearings that occur and how that works in terms of going from someone having paperwork filled out to them potentially being committed.

So one thing that plays into this is the particular definition in the Texas Health and Safety Code regarding what constitutes mental illness. And so a person specifically is not suffering from mental illness per the definition of the code if they are having epilepsy, dementia, substance abuse or intellectual disability, and so that's one thing that's very important. Now, a person could have perhaps dementia with another diagnosis and that might qualify to be a mental illness

Like schizophrenia, like they could be dementia and schizophrenia or one of the things we talked about was people sometimes believe that the involuntary commitment system is there to help treat their family member who has a drug or alcohol problem, and a drug or alcohol problem in and of itself is not sufficient to have them held unless there's an underlying psychological issue. Right?

That's right. Honestly, sometimes that doesn't quite sort itself out until the physicians have had an opportunity to observe the person for a while in that restricted setting. So as you asked, the most frequent process as you mentioned is law enforcement officers who see something out in the field and see a person who is acting strangely. A lot of times that law enforcement officer really has a lot of discretion. They can bring a person in on a notification of emergency detention where they believe that the reason they were acting so strangely is because of mental illness. One of the things that Tarrant County did a great job of in this process was trying to make the law enforcements drop off of the person at the psychiatric facility, which was our county mental health hospital. John Peter Smith Hospital referred to as JPS try to make it really quick and painless for the law enforcement officer because if they have to sit there for hours, you know what?

It's easier to just take them to jail for trespassing. And so kudos to Tarrant County for doing a good job of that and to the hospital for doing their best with very limited resources. But that's the most frequent way that a person gets into mental health court is because a police officer has brought them in on the notification of emergency detention in which they swear that there was not time to get a warrant because as you said, for instance, the person's out wandering in traffic, they're obviously being a harm to themselves or someone else.

The second way that a person can have civil mental health case brought against them and be detained for that purpose is with a warrant. And that is where really any adult person can go in front of a magistrate. So that might be a justice of the peace or one of the mental health judges and swear out an affidavit as to why the person is acting in a way that is a harm to themself or others, and so oftentimes a family member would do that. In Tarrant County, that family member could go to the local mental health authority and someone there would assist them and they just had a form prepared so that they could get the particulars of the recent conduct and then present that to one of the justices of the peace.

One of the questions that gets asked a lot of times by the patients is in the situation I described earlier where the family member is getting rid of the crazy aunt, does the county do anything or does law enforcement do anything to those family members if they find out that they have filled out a warrant for somebody, they're doing it out of retaliation or for nefarious purpose rather than because of legitimate concern about their mental health?

I mean, not that I've ever seen. Honestly, in my experience, I see many abuses in that way. I know that my predecessor would always tell a story about a family member who went in to get one of these warrants from a magistrate and it was actually a disgruntled spouse and they were about to break up. By the time the person who had been confined there on the mental health warrant, by the time the hospital figured out there's nothing wrong with this person, we're going to let them go, the weekend had passed and the disgruntled spouse had cleared all the possessions out of the home and left town. So I mean, fortunately personally I didn't see that kind of abuse, but because it is a prone to such abuse, after law enforcement files that notification of emergency detention or the warrant is issued by the magistrate, there's yet another step.

And that is the person has to be examined by two different physicians who give a written opinion that the person is currently exhibiting signs of being a harm to themself or other serious harm and that it's because of mental illness, not because of one of those other causes that we discussed. So then after that, the judge, and that would've been me, the associate judge assigned to the mental health docket in probate court would then look over the paperwork and either sign or not sign the orders so that the person would have to have a probable cause hearing if they chose and would be further detained and would be assigned an attorney ad litem. As a judge, I had the privilege of going to many conferences with judges from all over the state and I will say, so Keith and I have this experience in the big cities and our experience is very different from the experience that they have in the more rural areas of Texas.

Sadly, out there you don't have these psychiatric facilities. You may not have a psychiatrist if you're way over by Big Bend or something. Unfortunately, sometimes those more rural jurisdictions would bring a person to someplace like JPS. Law enforcement would bring them from many counties over, and if there weren't sufficient facts that occurred while they're at the county where they're trying to file the charges, the judge may just have to let the whole thing go. The other sad thing is that law enforcement officers in those rural locations, they don't have a psychiatric hospital they can take somebody to. Frequently you just have to take them to the emergency room and stay there with them, and that's just not a good situation.

And something really important that we need to mention is this podcast is not intended to be a roadmap for people to involuntarily commit their spouses who they're intending to break up with so that they can clean out the house over the weekend or get rid of a family member for a couple days to have some peace in the house. So we need to have that important disclaimer right now before we continue

Really it would be subject to prosecution.

Yeah, absolutely. You should be.

I wouldn't advise it. One of the interesting things I would say in Tarrant County, I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this podcast, and it really takes five distinct players to make this mental health system work really well. So you've got the courts, you've got the hospital system, you have law enforcement, you have the local mental health authority, and then you also have the prosecuting authority and the attorneys who are assigned to handle the cases. In Tarrant County, and I assume in Harris County as well, the district attorney's office actually has a specialized unit that handles these cases.

In Harris County, it's actually handled through the Harris County Attorney's office, and they had a dedicated attorney that, God love her, handled all of those cases and she retired and then another person who I was very good friends with became the mental health prosecutor through the county attorney's office. But yeah, I mean they had one person and in Harris County, the ad litem got assigned once the emergency or the probable cause hearing was assigned or was set, and we'd go out and visit everybody. A lot of times there were people who were frequent flyers in the system and homeless and used the mental health system as an avenue to get a bed, some clothes and some food for a couple days, and so they knew that the attorney ad litems were given waivers to allow the people to sign if they did not want to attend their probable cause hearing or based on our experience, we could say, "Look, this person is not capable of signing anything, so there's no use in having them sign, but there's also not going to be anything productive by them appearing today."

And so the hundred and 20 some odd... I mean usually the way that it worked in Harris County was you'd have three probable cause hearings, docket would be divided into three. And so you had everybody that was involuntarily committed over a one-week period. You'd have three separate dockets and then you'd have one final at the end. And I would say I probably have five to 10 people that would claim to want to appear on the probable cause docket each time, and then when the sheriffs go out to collect them in the morning, sometimes it's a little bit too early for them, they don't want to get out of bed and so they wouldn't show up. And then usually on the final hearings we'd have 10 or so, and then there was a lot of horse-trading with the testifying doctor who would come in and say, "Well, look, if we're going to release this person today anyway, so don't worry about it,' and we'd pass the hearing or this family members here is really concerned about them.

But the important thing was there were ad litems that were there that would just waive everybody or say that they try to get everybody to sign waivers. If someone told me that they wanted to go to courts, I always let them come and speak their peace because it gave them some level of catharsis. And just because they're in the system, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't be treated with respect and given the opportunity to say their peace. At the end of the day, some people went in there and started spouting out some crazy stuff and usually the judge would very lovingly cut them off after a few minutes.

I had Adolf Hitler go through, I had Jesus a couple times, John Lennon a few times, Elvis a time or two. So we tried the best we could to, despite the circumstances, treat those people with respect and give them the opportunity to be heard. There were times that I got people out, times when the judge found that there was no probable cause or the county hadn't met their burden. It was an interesting experience for sure. So tell me a little bit about when you were there, did you have those same experiences and how many probable cause dockets did you have per final hearing? And I guess explain how the final hearing works too.

Okay, so one thing that is interesting that has happened recently that you might not even be aware of, Keith, because I know you're not handling these cases currently, but recently there was a revision of the Texas Mental Health Code. One thing that was changed is not only can the attorney ad litem waive a probable cause hearing, but now the ad litem can sign off and waive the actual commitment hearing. Now, in Tarrant County, the attorneys who represent these patients on this docket are only given 20 to 25 cases at a time, and this is for about a two week period and they see the clients through the probable cause hearing and everything else. One thing that is really neat about the way Tarrant County has it set up, and I can't take any credit because this was all done before I got there, but the psychiatric unit at JPS hospital is a teaching facility.

They have these psychiatric residents and the residents are the ones who are new physicians but are there to do a four-year residency in psychiatry, and they are the ones who come down and testify at the commitment hearings. I think that most of the attorneys on this docket, they're paid a flat fee. It's really a reduced rate. They're doing this because they like the quickness of the docket. Most of them really just have a heart to help people, they want to help families in crisis. That's really the bottom line of why they take these case assignments because it's very difficult to do these cases. But I really don't believe that I saw the attorneys ad litems abusing the right to waive the hearing. One thing that has to be considered though is that when you do have that commitment hearing and you have the psychiatrist testify, they're really testifying in a certain extent against their patient.

A lot of times that's very difficult and I think it's disruptive to the process. So I mean those are all things that the attorney ad litem I think takes into consideration. I mean during COVID that was very difficult because the elected judge I worked with and I both had very strong feelings that all those Zoom or other comparable methods of having the hearings without having people together, it was a wonderful invention. However, we really hated for a person in the midst of a mental health crisis to have to pick out on the screen. Now wait a minute, which one's the judge? Which one's my attorney? Also, to not have your attorney present with you to literally maybe put their hand on your shoulder or maybe even give you a little kick under the table if you're going on too long. I mean you really miss something. So we tried as hard as we could to have the patient present with the attorney to at least have them in the same room if at all possible.

I was wondering how does the process... We talked about the probable cause hearing then, and you sort of have gotten into it a little bit, but how does it progress from the probable cause hearing to the final hearing and then what happens at the final hearing?

At any time during this process from the time when the judge has signed off and said, "Yes, there's enough evidence here, we're going to progress to the next level. This person is being assigned an attorney ad litem, I'm going to go ahead and schedule a probable cause hearing and the final hearing." And kind of like they did in Harris County, we had dockets every Monday and every Thursday, because there are strict time deadlines. You can't have a person just sitting there in the psychiatric hospital.

72 hours, right?

Yes, so they're entitled to a probable cause hearing if they want one within that period of time. So at any time during that process though, the psychiatrist is really... They're a witness, but they're a very special witness because at any time they may be of the opinion that the person no longer medically meets the criteria under the Texas Health and Safety Code to be held. So at any time if the person has improved... And what's very surprising to me is that oftentimes these cases, it's somebody who's gotten off their medication often. They've gotten off their psychiatric medication, and once they get back on it, there's frequently rapid improvement. So as an attorney representing this population, I might go in to meet with someone on a weekend regarding their scheduled probable cause hearing on Monday, and then by the time I go back to meet with them again on Wednesday in preparation for a Thursday commitment hearing, they're a completely different person it seems like-

Oh yeah.

... They're doing very well. And then frequently, as you said, the psychiatrist may say, "well, we have scheduled to discharge them tomorrow." So that's why the docket continues to dwindle, and it gets to where there aren't as many patients once we get to the commitment hearing. Another frequent scenario would be we're ready for the commitment hearing on Thursday, but the psychiatrist says, "In conjunction with our hospital social worker, we're actually almost ready to discharge this person medically, but the social worker is working to get a good placement for this person and so we request a continuance until Monday or until the following Thursday." Usually the attorneys ad litem would agree with that request and the patients would usually be agreeable as well, and that case would be continued. By the time the next hearing date came around, the person would be discharged.

Just a quick side note, there is a large percentage of this population who are homeless, and a lot of times it goes hand in hand. It's a social crisis. Perhaps their medication has been stolen, they're out on the streets, maybe their identification has been stolen, but it's not exclusively a situation that impacts that lower socioeconomic level of population. I mean, mental illness can take place anywhere in our society and so frequently I would see maybe a person of means who comes in and has had a crisis and is in mental health crisis and they have a case pending while their family's attorney comes in, and boy, they want to take care of this. Most attorneys don't know anything. Even a lot of judges really don't understand this very niche docket.

In fact, one thing that's interesting is the records are by statute of they are public records of a private nature. So let's say a couple's going through a divorce, one spouse knows that the other spouse had a civil mental health commitment, or maybe even they weren't committed, but they did go to the hospital and go through the beginning of this process. They send their attorney down to get those records from the county clerk. County clerk cannot give those records to anyone without a court order. The court can only give the records if they are pertaining to the person who is requesting the records, kind of like a HIPAA request, or if that person has given written permission to an attorney or another person acting as their agent. There are other very narrow reasons, but even when law enforcement would come and request the records, usually I would very carefully read the statute and have to deny their request. There are other ways they can get the records, but no, the clerk can't just turn them over.

Yeah, and that was one of the questions that I had because that is a frequent question, especially when you have someone that's affluent that ends up getting in the system. Once they have gotten back on their medication, they're very concerned about people's ability to obtain those records. In fact, we had a very well-known estate and trust attorney in Harris County who I was actually friends with who was involuntarily committed and I was one of the attorneys that was on the shortlist to represent her. I did not want to and thankfully, when they called me to ask me if I was available, I was in court. So I was not available at that moment, and they moved on to the next person because it was emergent and they agreed. So I dodged a bullet because it would've been really strange to represent a friend I had tried cases with, tried cases against, knew, and was very certain that it was probably just a momentary lapse that caused the problem.

Something else that we experienced, not very often, but I would say probably once every final hearing was sometimes the doctors would have to request that the court give them permission to force medication. Especially for people that were frequent visitors, the doctors knew them, they knew they were off their meds. They thought that the meds were going to cause spiders to come out of their head or whatever, and said the doctors would ask to have the permission to do an injectable. How often did you see that?

I actually saw that very frequently. Very frequently after we had a commitment hearing, the next hearing immediately thereafter would be a forced medication hearing. And often that is for a person who is just so delusional and they won't take the medication. Even though the person is being held there in the psychiatric hospital, the physicians cannot force them to take psychiatric medication. And if you think about it, I mean really we do want to guarantee to members of our society. I mean, it is very intrusive to give someone psychiatric medication, so it does require that extra step of substantial evidence that it is indeed necessary. And then as you said, normally it's administered forcibly via injection, and then it seems that after maybe a couple of days of that, then the person will be doing so much better but then they can go on to the oral medication. Some of the psychiatric medications can be, this is a separate issue from the forced medication, but some of them are now available in a long-acting injectable form, which is very convenient and works very well for some psychiatric patients.

Yeah. The reason to sort of touch on this subject really early in the run of the podcast was because one, there's an increased amount of distress these days, anxiety, job stress, pushing people over the edge. It seems like some of the generational issues are causing more and more psychiatric problems. And as a society, we need to be very sensitive to these issues and not label people or make them feel like there's something wrong with them. My daughter is a senior in high school in Houston and is the head of this mental health society, and they raise money to help people who are underprivileged to be able to get psychiatric care that they need.

So it's clearly something that's out there, but one of the things that anytime someone's trying to do something good or promote a system that is meant to help, there's always things that come up as criticisms. What are some of the common criticisms that you have seen of the mental health process? Did anybody ever raise things with you in casual conversation at a cocktail party or something like that? Someone come and say, Judge, one of the things that I really dislike about this system is X." I mean, what are those things that were ever mentioned to you?

Well, I do think that one thing just that the public in general has no idea of would be just the volume, particularly in the larger metropolitan areas, of these type of cases and the work that's going on behind the scenes. So because these records are private, you don't know. So I mean, sometimes when something terrible happens, some awful shooting or something, there have been instances previously with that person that the public doesn't know about and that the court cannot speak to. The hearings are public, anybody can actually come and watch that. There's just nobody knows about them or knows where they are. In Tarrant County, they're actually at the hospital and a lot of how the system has been designed is so that hopefully it won't be as jarring to the patient and will not be embarrassing to the patient. In fact, that is written into the Texas Mental Health Code that the hearings are to be conducted in a way that avoids embarrassment for the proposed patient.

As I have just kind of looked into what other states do, believe it or not, I think Texas does a really good job with our mental health system. The unfortunate thing, as you alluded to earlier, we don't have enough psychiatric beds for the patients who cannot be helped in the short term really need the long-term confinement. What has happened across the state is that those beds at the state facilities are being taken up by people who have criminal charges. And so most of the cases we're talking about here, there may be a trespass case or something very minor, very minor assault or something, but these aren't people who normally have terrible felonies outstanding as part of the incident. One thing that Tarrant County... I know I brag a lot about Tarrant County, but that's what my knowledge is, and most of this was set up before I took the bench.

One of the things that Tarrant County, I know Vera County, I think Harris County has this program. Some of the other counties have it as well, but there's an assisted outpatient treatment program, which is very successful in Tarrant County and requires the participation of all of those different players I mentioned earlier: law enforcement, the mental health authority has a huge part in this. They have a social worker assigned to the hospital who goes over every day and reviews the civil mental health commitment docket and all the people who were there at the hospital on the docket and looks for people who perhaps need some intense social services that then that might help them to keep them from getting back in this continuous loop of having these commitment. The psychiatrist also say that every time a person has one of these crisis situations, it makes it more difficult the next time for the psychiatrist to get the person back to their baseline, which is terribly sad.

Sometimes I think it is because the person needs some assistance with social services. If we have a person come through the system, let's say they're homeless and they have lost their ID because it got stolen from them while they were out sleeping on the street, you can't do anything to function in this society without an ID. You can't even stay at the Presbyterian night shelter if you don't have an ID. So that is something that the social workers were able to take a person in this assisted outpatient treatment program and help them with, help them get their ID, help them get plugged into counseling, pair them up with a mentor who is someone who is living with chronic mental illness and can assist them. Help them with housing, help them to get a job, help them apply for Social Security disability benefits. The participants in this program would come in once a month to the courthouse and meet with me, and I would give them basically a mom pep talk.

Some of them I got to know, it was just a 90-day program. We had some who voluntarily actually continued their involvement in the program for up to a year. And sometimes some of these people would have really creative sides to them like there was one girl I remember who was a jewelry maker, and she would come in and show me pictures of the jewelry she had made; an artist, several artists actually. But that program saw great success, although you can't force a person, even if it's a family member, somebody you love, you cannot force someone to take care of their mental health if they don't want to do it though.

Right. That sort of dovetails into the last thing we were talking about, which is that's the community involvement that needs to be there in order to help these people continue to be in the revolving door that is the mental health system. I mean, I have to say, I've also looked at other states and how they handled the mental health system and Texas really does. There were some things that in the moment I was critical of when I was doing it, and the biggest thing that I would say I was critical of was the lack of beds for long-term care. But we can talk to our legislators and try to get them to prioritize that and open another hospital. They had talked about doing it for a long time, long-term facility. But other than that-

There is one coming online in East Texas actually. That will help alleviate some of the crisis, but yeah, there needs to be much improvement on that.

But in terms of the initial process, it seems to be very fair that the doctors that are tasked with evaluating and determining what is in that person's best interest legitimately care to do a good job, the attorney ad litems that get assigned care to ensure that their clients are treated fairly. I never, and I don't know, and I knew a lot of the ad litems, none of us ever found the process to be burdensome. I mean mentally taxing, yes, especially in Harris County because you had to visit so many different hospitals, but never treated the patients with disrespect. We're always very kind. And I always sat and listened to people tell their story because sometimes there was a nugget in there that was something that maybe I hadn't considered that would assist me when I was defending them.

Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, the attorneys who are representing them, the doctors that are treating them, the judges that are overseeing the case are just a small part of what the community should prioritize as something that's important, especially given the fact that there is a drastic increase in what we see as far as mental health issues these days.

We need to continue to get out there, and anybody who's watching this, if they want to get involved and find some ways to help, you can reach out to either Lynn or myself and we can help you find some way to get plugged in to assist. But that's the most important thing is that it takes a village, especially what takes a village with kids, it takes a village with the elderly and it also takes a village with the mentally ill because sometimes it's just a matter of getting their other meds as you mentioned. Sometimes it's just a temporary problem that can be resolved very easily, and so we all have a responsibility to try to do what we can to help.

I absolutely agree with that. One thing that we didn't mention is that, I'm not sure what percentage, but a fairly healthy percentage of these cases, maybe 20, 25% are cases where a person is undergoing an acute episode of depression. A large portion of these patients have these ongoing lifetime diagnoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar, some type of psychiatric disorder, but there's also quite a percentage of the population in these cases who are having... It may be a major depressive disorder, but it may truly be something that is largely situational and a lot of the patients in that category are from our elderly population. I mean it's sad, but there are things that can be done with medication, with therapy, with social services, sometimes with community. I mean, it may be that a person is very lonely and sometimes getting them kind of kickstarted into a more of a true community can be very helpful. Or sometimes maybe it's an episode like this that gets a family member or a friend to be involved with that person and can really assist them in not going into further decline, but actually also into great improvements.

Well, I think that we've really covered this topic, and again, I'm so thankful, one, that you're with us at the firm now and also that you agreed to be on and talk about this because it's a sensitive issue. It's something that the public definitely needs to understand. There's a lot of misconceptions, as you mentioned about the mental health system, but there are resources out there. And so my final thought is if there is someone out there that needs help, please seek it. If there's someone out there that wants to help those that need help, there are a lot of resources on the internet regardless of which county of Texas you live in. But also, as I said, you can call our office and either ask for myself or Lynn and we'll do what we can to assist you.

And so I'm thankful to you for coming on today. I'm sorry that we both missed Stacy and hope that she feels better. And so this is before you go episode four, and I want all the listeners to know that the next episode will be with Marvin Blum, who is the founding attorney of The Blum Firm, and he's going to talk about estate planning and tax issues and so we're looking forward to having him on next. But Lynn Kelly, thank you so much for your time today, and that's all we got. Just remember, before you go, there are things that you should know.

Thank you.

Now, before you go, learn more about how Stacy and Keith can help protect you by calling MK Legal or visiting us on the web. Links to our website and phone number in the show notes. The information on this podcast is for general information purposes only. Nothing on this podcast should be taken as legal advice for any individual case or situation. This information is not intended to create and receipt, viewing or listening does not constitute an attorney-client relationship.