In truth, efforts to avoid stigma and discrimination against mentally ill people have been going on for decades, including in the criminal justice system, where judges routinely consider the mental health of criminal suspects. Consider the following cases:

In 2017, a Chicago judge ruled that Jawaun Westbrooks was not guilty for reasons of insanity after attacking two 55-year-old women with a hammer and ordered him hospitalized until 2021, when he was released.

In 2019, a Montgomery County court in Maryland dismissed several trespassing cases against Eliyas Aregahegne, a mentally ill 24-year-old man, and put him on probation.

And in March of this year, a judge in southwestern Washington released John Cody Hart on “supervised release” despite the stigmatizing, discriminatory appeal of the local prosecutor, who said: “the Community does not need somebody suffering from untreated mental illness out committing unprovoked serious violent offenses.”

But in each of the above cases, what happened next challenges Lancet’s contention that stigma and discrimination are “worse than the condition itself.”