Editorial: Progress slow as Virginia works to strengthen mental health response

Virginia must do more to ensure that people who call for help in a mental health crisis receive treatment with the best chance of a good outcome.

When someone calls 911 or 988, the mental health crisis number, about an emergency involving behavioral health, there’s a somewhat better chance these days that the response will come from people trained to deal with their particular emergency.

But the odds of a behavioral health crisis being dealt with by trained clinicians are improving more slowly than commonwealth officials envisioned in 2020, when the General Assembly passed the Marcus-Davis Peters Act. That law created the Marcus Alert system, intended to send behavioral health clinicians and other experts to someone in a mental-health crisis instead of — or, if necessary, in addition to