Belated kudos to the Portland Tribune for placing mental health and homelessness issues on their front-page story last week. Reporter Pete Korn's interesting story follows the narrative of one civil commitment hearing at Multnomah County courthouse, touching on a lot of the problems with the mental health system that we report on regularly.

The article sets up a basic question: Is it too hard to send people into a mental hospital against their will?

Civil commitments have become increasingly rare in Multnomah County during the past three decades. Now, a host of civic leaders from Mike Reese, Portland’s chief of police, to downtown businesspeople, want state law changed so it becomes easier to send county residents to psychiatric institutions against their will.

Even many mental health professionals are beginning to question whether it is too hard to civilly commit psychotic people in Multnomah County.

Another question that some sources in the article ask is this: Why have we reached the point where committing someone to a mental institution against their will seems like a good option?

As I walked out of Powell's last night with $50 worth of new books in my backpack and stopped to buy a Street Roots, the vendor launched into a little lecture about budget cuts. He grumbled about cuts to health care for the poor and mental health services, ending bitterly, "And yet we still have millions of dollars for light rail." If he and I had been talking on a blog, I would have noted that money for services and money for transportation comes from different sources, you can't compare apples to oranges like that. But we weren't on a blog. We were on the street, where he was going to sleep and, given that, I took his point to heart. Portland is in the terrible situation of trying to figure out who's just crazy enough to deprive of their civil liberties because our basic safety net is full of gaping holes. People should have access to affordable, wrap-around mental health and addiction services. We need to get to a point where we're asking how to best provide that kind of help, not how best to provide the last-ditch effort of locking people away.