A young man was charged with murder this week after the remains of his father were found in the woods in Richmond. According to his own Facebook page, he’d been in a mental hospital in February. He’d been picked up in Westbrook on a warrant from a town in Massachusetts for threatening people in the apartment building he’d been living in, and something he said led investigators to a very gruesome scene in Maine’s otherwise buccolic woodlands. On his Facebook page, he refers to himself as ‘God’ and has pictures of burning his guitar and his amplifier because he says he needed to kill the evil music.

Leroy Smith III isn’t alone. He was seriously mentally ill. And although the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of crime than criminals, very, very occasionally, people with serious mental illness do horrific things.

The saddest thing is, for many of these situations, there is a cure. It’s not cheap, it’s not easy and it’s not immediate, but it’s possible, with a great deal of support, for mentally ill patients to recover and thrive. Pumping a mentally ill patient full of drugs and leaving him to try to manage his disease on his own, however, is well known to have a high failure rate. Without support, people stop taking medicines and their disease reverts to its old, troubled state.

How do we solve the problem of the untreated mentally ill in society while not causing them to lose their freedom or their ability to make decisions about their medical care?

It’s a tough call, because part of the disease pattern is a failure to accept that one is mentally ill at all. In a recent study appearing in the journal “Health Services Research,” a survey of those with serious mental illness who were not compliant in taking medication found that the top reason people stopped taking medication was that they had a condition called anosognosia, a failure to accept that they have a disease that requires treatment. Patients thought it would get better on its own, or considered it a personal failure that they wished to solve themselves.

Medications also have side effects that can be troubling. Patients may not be able to afford their medications. They may be drug abusers or alcohol abusers and avoid taking their meds because they are self-medicating with other things.

How do we solve this problem?

First, we need to remove the stigma of mental illness, by making mental health part of regular medical health care. Everyone should be screened for mental health issues when they are well on a regular basis, so any illness can be caught when it can best be treated. There should be personnel on school campuses and in other locations with whom people taking medications check in, to make sure their medication is still working and isn’t causing significant side effects.

And if all else fails, we as a society simply must protect the mentally ill from themselves, and other people from them, if they cannot comply with their treatment options. It simply must be easier for worried parents or wives or husbands to find a treatment facility for their loved ones, even if the loved ones don’t think they have a disease. And police and other first responders should have a place where someone in desperate trouble can go and be treated for as long as it takes.

If the elder Smith had been able to keep his son in a treatment facility, two lives — Smith’s and his son’s — might have been spared.