Treatment for mentally-ill homeless people at issue

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested the law needed to be changed to require treatment for homeless people “who truly can’t help themselves.”

Two days later, Mayor Todd Gloria echoed that sentiment.

“I am pushing for state action on conservatorships so that people who cannot help themselves aren’t left vulnerable to the dangers of life on the streets,” he said in his State of the City speech last Wednesday.

This wasn’t the first time the governor and the mayor, along with others, have talked about expanding the state’s conservatorship law to more homeless people with severe mental illness.

As state and local governments begin pouring in more resources to house and help people living on the street, the idea of allowing more conservatorships increasingly has been part of discussions about reducing pervasive homelessness in California.

Bills aimed at making substantial changes to the law have failed to get through the Legislature in recent years, however. But the effort is gaining new momentum. In mid-December, a legislative committee held a hearing focused on conservatorships and whether the rules to allow them should be changed.

It’s a thorny issue about rights and responsibilities: Should society force people with badly impaired decision-making ability into the care they need, or protect their right to choose for themselves?

The former often is backed by mental health advocates and families with relatives who have mental disorders, while civil libertarians and disability groups tend to argue the latter, though the two sides aren’t neatly defined.

A central question is whether a looser law can still provide adequate safeguards to avoid putting people under conservatorship who shouldn’t be there, and making sure those who are ready to come out of it are allowed to do so.

Looming over the debate is a dark history of grim institutions and a law enacted more than half a century ago to do away with them that was supposed to provide a better alternative, but didn’t.

Conservatorships got a lot of attention last year with the plight of pop star Britney Spears, who got out from under her father’s legal control after 13 years.

John Cox, who ran as a replacement candidate in the unsuccessful Newsom recall, keyed off that in promoting his sweeping proposal to put homeless people living on the streets either in jail or treatment facilities. Other Republican candidates offered similar proposals.

“Britney Spears doesn’t need a conservator,” said Cox, a Rancho Santa Fe businessman. “Thousands of Californians living on the streets are the ones that need conservatorships. And we have to force people to do it.”

The discussions going on in Sacramento are more narrowly focused and predate the Spears resolution. Newsom raised the issue of overhauling conservatorships in his February 2020 State of the State address, which almost exclusively focused on homelessness.

Up until the mid-1960s, it was easier to get someone institutionalized involuntarily in California. Concern grew over reports of poor