By Julia Merchant • Staff Writer

Emergency rooms crowded with mentally ill patients. Sheriff’s deputies spending 96 hours supervising one individual. A sick man or woman whose situation is growing more dire by the second. It all adds up to a recipe for disaster — and North Carolina’s mental health care system is in imminent danger of becoming just that.

By Julia Merchant • Staff Writer

Patricia Frisbee Meyer’s son needed help.

The mental illness he had battled since childhood stayed mostly under control, but Meyer knew the onset of a bad episode when she saw it. Meyer, along with her husband, took her son to the emergency room at Haywood Regional Medical Center that Sunday — beginning a saga in which her son was restrained for nearly 48 hours before getting the care he desperately needed.

By Michael Beadle

When John and Suzanne Gernandt’s son Matthew began showing signs of schizophrenia, it might have been misread as teenage rebellion — a phase he would pass through once the hormones settled down.