Reforms in Treatment of Mentally Ill the Lone Bright Spot in Tragedy

Mental illness cast its dark shadow over Mary Stanley's family years before the day 20 years ago her son Bryan walked into St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Onalaska and killed Father John Rossiter, Ferdinand Roth Sr., and William Hammes.  

(February 11, 2005 - West Salem, WI) -- For years Bryan Stanley struggled with, and was treated for, paranoid schizophrenia. While his family knew he needed help, they struggled with the fact that there wasn't much they could do for him.

Stanley was sick and while his mother tried to get him the help he so desperately needed the state's mental health laws provided no support.

Stanley finally got the help he needed when he was committed to the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison after he was tried and found innocent, of the three murders, by reason of mental defect.

Shortly after he was committed to the facility and put back on medication, Stanley returned to the person he was before he stopped treatment.

It was too late. The damage was done.

To psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who at the time was director of Wisconsin's Winnebago Mental Health Institute, the triple murder at St. Patrick's was a senseless and avoidable tragedy that resulted from the state's inadequate civil commitment laws.

"These were situations where there was such scrupulous attention to people's rights that they overlooked reasonable concern for the patient's life or innocent bystanders' lives," Treffert said.

Stanley's case set in motion a chain of events that, after more than a decade, led to changes in the state's civil commitment law.

Bryan Stanley testifies during one of his unsuccessful attempts to gain release from Mendota Mental Health Institute.

But some people still think the state has a ways to go in providing adequate services to people suffering from mental illness. State lawmakers introduced the first "fifth standard" bill in 1984.

Up to that point Wisconsin's mental health act, Chapter 51, included four other criteria that can be met before a person can be involuntarily detained or committed for treatment of major mental illness.

Most states have only three criteria: danger to self, danger to others or grave disability. Wisconsin has two criteria related to grave disability.

The bill that passed in 1996 added a fifth standard of dangerousness under which a patient could be involuntarily committed.

Many have said that Bryan Stanley's case was the spark that led to significant changes to the state's civil commitment laws. But Many mental health professionals were concerned about the state's law more than a decade before Stanley's case.

Treffert remembers.

Prior to 1972, Wisconsin's mental health law allowed for civil commitment, and involuntary treatment, if a patient was dangerous or couldn't take care of themself. That law was challenged for being too vague.

The resulting court decision, named after Alberta Lessard, a mentally ill woman who challenged the state's civil commitment law, "swung the pendulum in the opposite direction," Treffert said.

The Lessard decision said the only time a person could be committed was if they were suicidal or homicidal. The actual language was "an immediate physical threat," Treffert said. For Treffert, and many other mental health professionals, that was a very hard-to-reach threshold.

"Too often people had to wait until something happened," Treffert said.

After that decision Treffert began collecting cases from around the country that he called "patients dying with their rights on."

In 1982, then-Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfus appointed Treffert to a committee that began looking into ways to care for people with serious mental illness who did not qualify for treatment under law but who, without treatment, faced harm or even death.

From their findings they came up with that first fifth standard bill, but Act 292 wasn't signed into law until 1996, with John Medinger and Brian Rude, then local lawmakers, supporting the bill.

After her son was committed to Mendota, Mary Stanley became an ardent advocate of what she thought was a necessary change to the law, a change that might have saved her son.

In 1985, Michael Rosborough was a supervising attorney in the state public defenders office, when he was called to defend Bryan Stanley during his murder trial.

It was one of the first cases of that nature he had been assigned to as an attorney.

"It was a very emotional time," Rosborough said.

He has not had a case quite like it since. "That one stands alone."

Rosborough, who has been a circuit court judge in Vernon County for the past 19 years, and a chief judge for the 7th Judicial District for the past three, said he thinks the changes to the state's mental health laws haven't done as much for the mentally ill as many had hoped.

"The problem is we don't provide a lot of resources to deal with people with mental illness," Rosborough said.

He said he would like to see resources devoted to integrating people with mental illness into the community so they don't end up feeling isolated.

But he said that, unfortunately, adequate funding for mental health issues is often the first to get cut.

"You know who gets shortchanged are people who are powerless," Rosborough said. "Some are fortunate and have loving families, others do not."

Bryan Stanley's problems didn't begin on Feb. 7, 1985. That was the day his problems got worse.

The disease he suffered from, paranoid schizophrenia, afflicts millions in this country. Appoximately 1 percent of the population will develop schizophrenia during their lifetime and it is estimated that more than 2 million Americans suffer from the disease in a given year.

While the disease affects many, it is one of the least understood and receives little sympathy.

Almost four years before Stanley stopped taking his medication, a group formed in the basement of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in La Crosse, the same church to which the Stanley family belonged.

The La Crosse County chapter of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill first started holding meetings in the basement of Holy Trinity to provide support to families and friends of people suffering from mental illness.

Helen and Ralph Buehler of La Crosse, two of the original members, still belong to the group.

"We try to let people know what options there are for dealing with mental illness," Helen Buehler said.

Buehler, who has a daughter living with paranoid schizophrenia, still remembers that day when she heard the terrible news from Onalaska.

Like many, she was horrified by the facts of those first reports, three people shot. But, unlike people whose lives have not personally been affected by mental illness, something else came to her mind. "I thought to myself, 'I hope that's not a mentally ill person.'"

Helen Buehler remembers when Mary Stanley started attending meetings, after the murders.

"We had friends in the Alliance for the Mentally Ill. They called me and told me about the group," Stanley said. "Until then, I didn't even know I had a friend in the world."

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Before then Stanley said she didn't talk with many other people about her son's mental illness because she didn't know other people who were dealing with mental illness like her family was.

Finally, there was a place where she could find support and information about what her son was going through.

The Buehlers remember feeling the same way.

"When this happened in our family, we didn't know anything about mental illness," Helen Buehler said. "We didn't know how to cope with it."

Helping her daughter cope with mental illness, Buehler said she thinks the services here in La Crosse are superior to many across the state, but knows people are trying to do better.

"They're always trying to improve services," she said.

For more than 20 years now the La Crosse Alliance for the Mentally Ill has been doing what it can to provide support to families dealing with mental illness, at the same time trying to raise awareness and educate the public about mental health.

The group now holds its monthly meetings at La Crosse's First Congregational Church.

One of the newest programs from the Alliance for the Mentally Ill is the Family-to-Family Education Program, a free 12-week course structured to help caregivers understand and support individuals with serious mental illness.

Patti Jo Severson of La Crosse organized and is helping teach the courses. La Crosse County is the 15th in Wisconsin to offer the program. Severson thinks it's an important step for the group.

"We're realizing that mental illness is a medical condition," Severson said. "It clearly affects the lives of many people. It is a struggle for families."

Severson, who also has a family member living with mental illness, was just elected to the board of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill based in Madison.

She said that mentally ill people still face misunderstanding in the community and the stigma attached to mental illness.

"The challenge is education and to help folks understand that this is an illness like any other," Severson said.

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