A new California law will expand the state’s conservatorship system to include people who are unable to provide themselves with basic needs like food and shelter due to untreated mental illness or unhealthy drug and alcohol abuse. The law is intended to address one of the primary causes of homelessness by forcing people to accept treatment for their mental illness or addiction.
Needless to say, there is fierce opposition to the plan from people who believe the state is short-changing the homeless. What the homeless really need, advocates say, is decent housing. Everything else is a matter of supplying services to people so they can stay in their own homes and live an independent life.
The problem is that the courts agree with this point of view.
“California is undertaking a major overhaul of our mental health system,” Newsom said in a signing announcement Tuesday. “We are working to ensure no one falls through the cracks, and that people get the help they need and the respect they deserve.”
The law was sponsored by Sen. Susan Eggman (D-5th district), and it’s the latest attempt to reform California’s 56-year-old law governing mental health conservatorship. Most California mayors of large cities and the National Alliance on Mental Illness in California supported the bill. Those opposed include disability advocates who worry that more mentally ill homeless people will get locked up in institutions.
“Our state prisons are full of people who, after they’ve been restored to competency, are in our state prisons because of serious mental health issues and drug addiction issues,” Eggman said in an interview. “I think that is the most inhumane way to treat the most vulnerable of us.”
This is very true. Even more problematic is that especially for addiction, no one can be forced to quit drugs or alcohol. Treatment experts point out that a patient needs to hit “rock bottom” or come close to it in order to motivate addicts to quit.
Of course, many addicts reach “rock bottom” after overdosing. But there’s no magic pill or elixir that can cure addiction. Nor is there a way to force mentally ill people to take the medication that would allow them to function in society.
Newsom also is expected to sign legislation sending a ballot measure to voters that includes two key provisions: a $6.4 billion bond to pay for 10,000new treatment beds and supportive housing, and an overhaul of California’s 20-year-old law that funds mental health services with a tax on millionaires. A majority of voters in the March primary election would need to approve the measure for it become law.
All of this comes just as CARE Court, Newsom’s signature mental health legislation from last year, begins rolling out in an initial cohort of seven counties. Glenn, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne counties opened their Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Courts on Oct. 2; Los Angeles County will open its court on Dec. 1. The rest of the state will follow next year.
Addressing serious mental illness among the state’s growing unhoused population is a major focus of all of these initiatives. That population has burgeoned to more than 170,000 people, less than a quarter of whom have severe mental illness, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
California has a chance to be on the cutting edge of a revolution in care for the mentally ill. The state also has a chance to be held up and made an example of how “good government” can go crazy and take on too much at once. We might have hoped that California would have practiced a little “incrementalism” by trying some of these ideas and judging their efficacy going along.
Instead, we’ve got the whole kit and kaboodle. And how it all works out is a mystery that we’ll find out together.
