President Obama and Vice President Biden gathered the usual suspects for a White House mental-health conference today focused on “stigma.” While ostensibly called in reaction to tragedies such as Newtown, it ignores the elephant in the room: people with serious mental illnesses.

Obama simply does not understand the difference between poor mental health and serious mental illness and the “experts” he is relying on are happy to keep it that way. Everyone can have their mental health improved, but only 5 to 9 percent of people have serious mental illnesses. Obama keeps focusing on the former and ignoring the later. Yet it is people with untreated serious mental illness who are responsible for headline-grabbing acts of psychotic-fueled violence. It is people with serious mental illnesses, not low self-esteem who have increased incidence of homelessness, suicide, arrest, incarceration, and hospitalization. It is people with serious mental illness who we as a kind and compassionate society should be helping.

After Obama’s last mental-health conference in April, mental “health” advocates convinced the president to spend $140 million more to identify people with mental illness. As I wrote after that conference:

Jared Loughner, who shot Gabrielle Giffords; James Holmes, who shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.; John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan; Aaron Bassler, who shot a former mayor of Fort Bragg, Calif.; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who mailed explosive packages around the country; Ian Stawicki, who shot five others and then himself in Seattle; Eduardo Sencion, who shot five National Guardsmen at a Nevada IHOP restaurant; Russell Weston, who shot two guards at the U.S. Capitol building; and Adam Lanza, who shot his mother, 26 others, and himself in Newtown, Conn. — all were known to be ill before they became headlines. The problem wasn’t lack of identification. It was lack of treatment.

If Obama wants to get serious about serious mental illness, he should invite criminal-justice experts to the White House. The mental-health system “treats” the worried well and offloads the seriously ill to shelters, jails prisons and morgues. There are now three times as many mentally ill incarcerated as hospitalized. Police, sheriffs, district attorneys, correction officers, parole officers, and forensic hospital workers go where the mental-health system won’t: to the aide of people with serious mental illness. No sane mental illness policy can be contemplated without their perspective.

There are five steps President Obama can take to help people with serious mental illness, keep patients and the public safer, and save money.

‐Fund Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) laws so rather than requiring people with serious mental illness to become a “danger to self or others” we can prevent people from becoming a danger to self or others.

‐Change HIPPA privacy laws so parents of seriously mentally ill individuals can get the information they need to help their loved ones get care.

‐End federally sanctioned Medicaid discrimination against the seriously mentally ill incorporated in the “IMD Exclusion.” It allows the federal government to refuse to reimburse for inpatient hospital care for persons with serious mental illness. While Obama is correctly adamant

that private insurers end discrimination against the mentally ill, he has been silent on federal discrimination

‐Send those with serious mental illness to the front of the line for services

rather than to the back as is current practice.

‐Eliminate SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration) which is funding nationwide activities designed to prevent the most seriously ill from receiving treatment. Any useful programs can be transferred to NIMH, CDC, and other agencies with better focus.

Obama promised to “listen to good ideas no matter where they come from.” So he should listen to Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.), a former psychologist. He has done a brilliant job in Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearings of looking at what real solutions might be to prevent the arrest, incarceration, violence, suicide, homelessness, and hospitalization of the most seriously ill. And he does it by making government smaller, not bigger.

If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then Obama qualifies. He should reach out to those who want to change the status quo, not those invested in maintaining it.

— D. J. Jaffe is executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org.