"A pair of state legislators from the Charlottesville area will spend much of the next three months examining dozens of bills that could provide the largest revision of state mental health laws in 30 years.

Dels. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle County, and David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, are members of a special House Courts of Justice subcommittee that Bell will head up to handle legislation dealing with mental health commitments, legislators said Sunday.

Bell will chair the seven-member subcommittee, said Del. David B. Albo, R-Springfield, the chairman of the Courts of Justice Committee, who appointed the delegates for their legal expertise.

“We have got a pile of drafted bills, some of which I will introduce,” said Bell, a former prosecutor. “Do we change the actual mental health commitment standards? Yes, I think the question is how.”

Bell and Toscano said they believe the standard for involuntary commitments, requiring that an individual be deemed an imminent danger to himself or others, is too strict.

Bell said legislation could define a new “serious risk standard” that could loosen the imminent danger requirement but ensure that a magistrate must find that for an involuntary commitment “we are talking about serious bodily harm.”

In addition to a new commitment standard, “we might come up with different standards for outpatient vs. inpatient” treatment, Bell said.

Many balance tests will be considered in the legislation, such as weighing public safety and privacy considerations, he said.

Toscano said there would be crucial budget tests as well for the most sweeping rewrites of state mental health laws since mental patients were largely deinstitutionalized in the 1970s.

“There’s little doubt that we need to change some things, and it is not clear how much money we have to make the changes that need to be made,” said the former Charlottesville mayor. “We are not doing a great job in Virginia right now on mental health.”

Toscano has a private legal practice in the same Charlottesville building as Bell’s.

Bell said his top legislative priorities in the 2008 General Assembly session that begins Jan. 9 would be bills to reshape Virginia’s mental health treatment and commitment process in light of last April’s shootings at Virginia Tech.

Seung Hui Cho, the student who committed mass murder at Tech before he took his own life, had been ordered to undergo outpatient treatment but slipped through the cracks of the treatment system, Albo said. “They ordered Cho to do a bunch of stuff and there was no follow-up. He didn’t do it,” Albo said.

New standards for outpatient treatment are likely to be part of the legislative package that Bell’s subcommittee will study, Albo and Bell said.

“It’s obvious the system we have right now is not working,” Albo said. “This is going to be really, really serious stuff.”

Toscano said he is ready to handle some of the bills Bell is giving delegates on the seven-member panel to patron.

“I’ve been interested in changing some of the standards by which people are temporarily detained,” he said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there weren’t 50 bills being prefiled” to revise mental health treatment and commitment standards, Toscano said." (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, December 3, 2007)