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Professionals without proper training are deciding whether suspected criminals in the District are competent to stand trial and patients are being unnecessarily held at the public psychiatric hospital, according to a report released Monday.

The 191-page report, by the nonprofit Council for Court Excellence and the D.C. auditor, examined the way the city's Department of Behavioral Health handles defendants suspected of being mentally ill. The authors presented their findings Monday at an oversight hearing of the D.C. Council.

I got the call every addiction doctor dreads: A patient of mine nearly overdosed. He had a long history of addiction, starting with opioid pain pills in his teens after a sports injury and progressing to heroin by his early 20s. He had been in recovery for six months.

"Was it heroin?" I asked the doctor, who was calling from the emergency department.

"Not opioids," said the doctor. "Benzos."

Last night, my wife and I placed an Internet time-limit app on my 12-year-old son's iPhone. It seemed long overdue, but he threw the kind of stink I would have expected if we gave away our puppy.

In medicine, we talk a lot about advance directives, mainly in the context of end-of-life treatment. But, recently, while treating a patient with schizophrenia, I realized how powerful and important that same document could be in caring for someone living with mental illness.

My patient had catatonia, and was gripped by psychosis. He could barely move or speak. He refused treatment, and in suffering from paranoia, also refused food and water. He wouldn't even let us talk to his family. Soon, his electrolytes were imbalanced, and his kidneys started to malfunction.

As the nation's dairy farmers struggle through their fourth year of depressed milk prices, concerns are rising that many are becoming depressed themselves. The outlook for the next year is so bleak, it's heightening worries — especially in the Northeast — about farmer suicides.

Agri-Mark Inc., a dairy cooperative with about 1,000 members, saw three farmers take their own lives in the past three years. The most recent was last month. It's a very small sample, but very sharp and disturbing increase.

As two clinical psychologists, we ought to be thrilled when public conversations draw attention to mental health. After all, mental health problems tend to be under-researched, undertreated, and overstigmatized. So when President Donald Trump promises, as he did last week, to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health," it should be music to our ears.

As a nation, we have the singular distinction of being so familiar with mass shootings we already know the narrative gun control opponents roll out in the aftermath: It's not about guns, it's about mental illness.

President Donald Trump continued to point to mental-health solutions to America's gun-violence problem this week, this time saying that he would like to reopen mental asylums that have been closed over the past few decades.

"Part of the problem is we used to have mental institutions ... where you take a sicko like this guy," he said in a discussion with state and local officials about last week's mass shooting at a high school in Florida. "We're going to be talking seriously about opening mental-health institutions again."