Defining What It Means to Care: Alberta Lessard never stopped fighting for compassionate mental health care.

• Author: Harris, Leah

On an early morning last July, I surveyed the green expanse of Milwaukee's County Grounds in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Since the 1850s, this land has housed institutions to warehouse poor, disabled, and discarded members of society. My mother, Gail Harris, was one of them.

In fact, I was visiting my hometown to research a book I'm writing about her decades as a patient in the city's public mental health system. Now known as County Grounds Park, the land is being maintained by a crew of volunteers who are determined to preserve its ecological diversity and history. One volunteer offered to take me on a private tour. He told me about a legal case that resulted in the demolition of North Division, the sprawling asylum that had stood for a century.

"Lessard?" I blurted out in response.

"You know your stuff," he replied. But back then, I'd only heard the name Alberta Lessard. I knew practically nothing about her famous case, or her story. After the tour, I pored over the newspaper archives to learn everything I could about her.

In 1971, former West Allis school teacher Alberta Lessard, fearing someone was at her door, lowered herself out of the second-story window of her apartment building, landing safely on the ground below. Someone who saw her called the cops. Lessard insisted she hadn't been trying to kill herself, but the cops didn't believe her, and she was shipped off to North Division. Unbeknownst to her, a doctor was recommending to the judge that she be committed there for life.

While forcibly drugged in the hospital, Lessard called Milwaukee Legal Services for help. Attorneys Bob Blondis and Tom Dixon took on her case, launching Lessard v. Schmidt, a class action lawsuit on behalf of all persons civilly committed in Wisconsin.

In October 1972, a federal court panel found Wisconsin's civil commitment laws unconstitutional, as they failed to provide those alleged to be mentally ill with the proper procedural safeguards. The Lessard decision held that people facing civil commitment should have the same due process rights as those facing criminal incarceration. As a result, the state would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were an imminent danger to themselves or others. Lessard sparked a revolution in mental health law and policy, as other states followed Wisconsin's lead and revised their mental health laws to reflect the federal court's decision.

Despite the reforms bearing her name, Lessard got caught in Milwaukee's...