My wife works every day with people who have been committed to an institution because their behaviour has been judged to be dangerous. Today, in most cases, such people can be stabilized and enabled to lead fairly "normal" lives if a competent doctor gets the proper medication for a given case sorted out. Then, all too often, a general human tendency takes over: "why should I keep taking medicine; I feel all right now." The cases when this leads to outright tragedy become high profile incidents; they have nothing to do with where anyone is on the political spectrum.