This is the mental health delivery system that I helped build.In 2008, at age 23, Tim moved to San Francisco and has lived mostly on the streets there ever since. This is heartbreaking.

I can’t point to a single time when I first realized Tim’s problems were not just normal. The day he lay down in the middle of the road — just to see if a car would run him over — comes to mind, however.

More than one educator has told me that I shouldn’t blame the schools: Their purpose is to educate children, not to treat them. I understand this. But I also learned from personal experience that ignoring a child’s special needs makes meaningless the special-education concepts of “appropriate” and “least restrictive” education that are embodied in the laws we passed.

Mental illnesses cost as much as cancers to treat each year, and the National Institute for Mental Health notes that serious mental illnesses can reduce life expectancy by more than 25 years. That reduction is almost twice the 13 years of life lost, on average, to all cancers combined. When Tim needed hospitalization, an insurer sent him to drug rehab. Imagine the outcry if the insurer had tried to send a smoker with lung cancer who needed hospitalization to drug rehab.

Perhaps, even if Tim had gotten earlier, more effective and better integrated care, he still would have become homeless. But I don’t believe that. Tim is where he is today because of a host of public policy decisions we’ve made in this country. It took a nation to get Tim there. And it will take a national commitment to get him — and others like him — back.

In 2008, at age 23, Tim moved to San Francisco and has lived mostly on the streets there ever since.

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