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Australian broadcaster Anne Deveson's son Jonathan developed schizophrenia in his late teens. Over roughly seven years he moved between hospitals, the family home, jails, and the streets, grew violent toward his mother and siblings, and was repeatedly discharged because he did not meet the criteria for involuntary detention. He died at 24 of a drug overdose, homeless and alone.
Commitment laws that allow involuntary treatment only when a person is imminently dangerous to self or others structurally delay care until a crisis has already happened. Because psychosis often destroys the insight needed to accept treatment voluntarily, a rule framed as protecting civil liberty can leave the person free only to deteriorate, offend, or die. The family can see the collapse coming but has no legal lever to act on it.
Closing psychiatric hospitals without funding housing, outreach and crisis services does not end institutional care. It moves that care onto untrained, unpaid relatives, and when they break down, onto police, prisons and the street. The official system counts discharges as success, while the cost shows up uncounted in exhausted families and homeless patients.
Each agency (hospital, police, courts, welfare, housing) acts correctly within its own remit, yet a person whose needs cross all of them belongs to none and falls through the gaps. Seeing failure as a property of the handoffs rather than of any single service explains how a system of individually reasonable professionals can collectively abandon someone. It also explains why families end up as the only continuous case managers.