HOUSTON—In the past few weeks, suspects with a history of mental illness have been front-and-center on the news.

In one case, a woman was shot after a bow-and-arrow attack in a Houston office building.

In another, a man found wandering in the middle of Highway 6 had a violent scuffle with police.

Another man injured police officers during a chase before crashing his car.

Danny Sneed said he could have been any one of those people, and in a sense, he was.

“Man, I got some issues,” he said.

He’s battled drugs and served prison time for robbery.  But he says the root of it all is a particular mental illness: bipolar disorder.

“It means you’re either real, real happy, or you’re gonna get real, real depressed. Bipolar,” Sneed said.

But now, Sneed has a job and rents a room downtown.

But could the difference be as simple as taking medication?

Sneed says no.

“Putting you on medication doesn’t cure you. It just puts you on pause,” Sneed said.

Sneed says the thing that made a difference for him is the fact that he’s an Army veteran.

That means he has access to federally funded, long-term mental health services.

That kind of counseling and follow-up goes beyond just taking meds.

But Sneed says many of the guys he met in prison and on Houston’s streets aren’t so lucky.

“That’s not even available to Britney Spears! Britney Spears can’t get the treatment I got,” Sneed said.

“The Crisis Clinic treats them for 24 hours, then discharges them to nowhere,” Betsy Schwartz of Mental Health America said.

Mental health advocates like Schwartz say the state mental health care system in Texas is so woefully underfunded, it ranks near the bottom in the country. State funding has improved in recent years to provide emergency therapy, but little is left over for long-term care.

“So we know that on any given day, there are thousands of people who have nowhere to turn. So they wait until they’re in a crisis,” Schwartz said.

If that crisis results in an arrest, the cost to taxpayers skyrockets.

“We’ve been pretty good in Harris County about the long sentences, but we haven’t done as well will rehabilitating people,” Harris County State District Court Judge Jan Krocker said.

Krocker says it’s a huge waste of your tax dollars, because the mentally ill are often cycled time and time again through the courts, jails and prisons without getting the therapy that could’ve made a real difference.

“You’d be surprised. A lot of people can give up drugs, illegal drugs, quite easily after they get on the right medication, because they’re really just trying to self-medicate,” Krocker said.

But things will change this fall.

That’s when Krocker will start holding mental health court, where specially trained lawyers and caseworkers will try to steer more mentally ill defendants to therapy, rather than jail.

In the coming weeks, mental health advocates will be lobbying the Texas Legislature for millions to provide more long-term therapy.

That could help pay for itself by keeping the mentally ill out of expensive crisis-care facilities and jails.

It all makes perfect sense to Sneed.

“Maybe at the core and the foundation of a lot of criminal behaviors is undiagnosed mental disorders,” Sneed said.