The controversy surrounding forced psychiatric treatment rises in the wake of last week’s massacre:

For Gambs, last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech highlight major failings in our nation’s mental health laws: Long-standing laws protecting patients’ rights make it difficult for authorities and family members to intervene and order a loved one to receive treatment.

“It absolutely breaks my heart and makes me so sad that so many people died because we, as a society, didn’t treat this man,” said Gambs, San Luis Obispo County’s president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of California. Her son, now 34, lives in community housing and is successfully stabilized on medication.

Emerging details about Seung-Hui Cho’s interactions with the mental health system more than two years before the shootings have stirred up long-standing debate around how state and local authorities should handle mentally ill people who refuse treatment but show signs of potentially dangerous behavior.