Landmark law failed to fix California's mental health system - Sacramento Bee
Loraine Franciscani was desperately searching for help for her severely mentally ill son, as she made clear a letter she wrote on Dec. 21, 1970. Another mother could have written the same letter today.
Franciscani explained that her son had been doing well for a time after being released from a state hospital to the family home on 42nd Street in Sacramento, but “then went completely berserk.” Police arrived and took him to the county hospital.
Though he was safe for the moment, Franciscani knew her son could sign himself out of the hospital, and “we are fearful of bodily harm.”
“We wish to ask, therefore: Does a crime have to be committed before the one who is ill can be once confined for treatment?”
The letter to Assemblyman Frank Lanterman is one of many l have found as I read through the dozen volumes that comprise the history of the main law that governs California’s broken mental health care system, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967.
I do not know what became of the Franciscani’s family’s tragic situation. But I thought of the mother’s lament 51 years later, when the Assembly Health and Judiciary committees convened last week in the Capitol to consider fixing the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.
Signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967, the act was a landmark, one that other states used as a model. Approved at a time when Congress and California were passing major civil rights legislation, Lanterman’s law guaranteed people who were severely mentally ill could refuse treatment unless they were deemed to be a clear danger to themselves or others. It had the lofty goal of ending the practice of using state hospitals to warehouse people who committed no crime but were mentally ill, demented, developmentally disabled or brain damaged.
In that sense, it was a success. California’s state hospitals housed 37,489 people in 1959. By 1969, that number was 16,116. The Department of State Hospitals provides care today to about 11,000 people in the few remaining state hospitals and in jails. Almost all of them have committed crimes.
No one is advocating recreating state hospitals. But more than five decades after the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act became law, the state still lacks a system of community mental health care, as several people testified on Wednesday.
“We have a collective failure,” Veronica Kelley, San Bernardino County’s Department Behavioral of Health director, told the committee.
The problems are many. The state spends billions on mental health care but offers little direct oversight to counties, which are responsible for providing that care. Whether people facing a crisis receive care often depends on where they live. Some counties don’t provide the most basic data about their most severely mentally ill residents.
“We wouldn’t be here if this thing were running like a clock. Clearly, there are serious, serious challenges,” Assembly Health Committee Chairman Jim Wood, a Santa Rosa Democrat said as the hearing progressed.
“The status quo is not working,” Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, Sacramento Democrat, said, and referred to the dystopian scene on K Street.
“We have a huge breakdown,” Sen. Susan Eggman, a Stockton Democrat who has carried legislation to plug some of the gaps, and intends to push for more.
State Auditor Elaine M. Howle, whose office audited the system last year, testified that the wait for beds can be a year, making clear the obvious, that people facing a crisis cannot wait a year for help. Los Angeles County, she said, has reported a need for 1,500 additional beds simply to house people facing mental health crises.
As the hearing went on, some people testified about the need to protect peoples’ rights. Others spoke of negative experiences in the system, and how people of color are disproportionately held against their will.
Then there was the mother, Teresa Pasquini. Representing the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Contra Costa County woman told the committee about her son’s 20-year battle with mental illness and her fight to get him care, before he commits a crime. Like the mother 50 years earlier, Pasquini made clear the issue:
“You ask, ‘How can LPS be improved?’ Please stop forcing our loved ones to deteriorate to a level of dangerousness and an inability to survive safely in our communities before they are eligible for the help they need. Treatment is not a bad word.”
Lanterman developed the law after years of study, investigation and hearings. It’s only fitting that legislators held a lengthy hearing on its failings. Perhaps, Eggman suggested, a special session focused on mental health care is needed. Whatever it takes, because as is evident on any street in any city in California, the current system is not working.
source: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article256693562.html
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