Opposition may kill bills to address mental illness
Gov. Gavin Newsom and a handful of lawmakers have prioritized bills addressing the mental health crisis on California streets this year. But opposition to those measures, particularly concerns about infringing on the civil rights of people with severe psychotic disorders, is threatening to derail them.
The bills seek to address a very small but visible segment of people — often living on the streets — with severe, untreated psychosis. Two of the bills that the mayors of California’s 13 biggest cities, including San Francisco, have advocated to reduce barriers to placing people in conservatorships look unlikely to advance ahead of a key deadline. Another championed by Newsom that would create a new process for getting people into treatment known as Care Court cleared a key hurdle last week but still faces opposition from civil liberties groups.
If the bills die, so could the Legislature’s ability to help thousands of people who can’t care for themselves this year, said Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco.
“People are literally dying on our streets because of untreated mental health issues,” he said. “It’s time for us to do something about it.”
Care Courts would give family, community members, probation officers and others a pathway to refer people with severe mental illness into treatment programs. Under the system, judges would order people to participate in treatment plans and require counties to provide services to them. Newsom has pointed to examples of people languishing on the streets of San Francisco as an impetus for the bill.
Supporters say the program would help the state reach people who have fallen through the cracks and are cycling among jails, hospitals and street encampments. Opponents say courtordered treatment is not the answer.
At a hearing this year, Keris Myrick, who runs a mental health organization in Los Angeles, described her own experience being forced into treatment and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Overwhelmed by the voices in her head while living in Los Angeles in her 30s, she was placed under an involuntary psychiatric hold in a hospital. She says she was forced to undergo treatment that did not help her and had to leave California because there was no affordable housing available to her.
If the bill is passed, she said, she worries that the Care Court system could lead to more experiences like hers and disproportionately harm Black and Indigenous people.
“My fear is that Care Court will perpetuate disparities,” she said. “Courts have not been fair, safe or a place of care for Black and brown people.”
She and other opponents have argued that there needs to be more funding for voluntary services, which don’t have adequate funding and staff to help all the people who want care.
Supporters of the measure acknowledge that the system needs to be properly funded. But they dispute the idea that adding funding to existing voluntary programs would be enough.
The Care Court bill passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Lawmakers must vote it out of two additional committees, and then out of both full houses of the Legislature before it would reach Newsom.
The two conservatorship bills, both written by Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, look unlikely to even come up for a vote in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. They aim to help people with even more severe mental illness than Care Court.
One, SB1416, would expand the definition of “gravely disabled” in California law to include people who can’t look out for their own safety to allow a court to appoint a conservator to make decisions for them.
Supporters say the bill is needed to help people who can’t care for themselves. But a coalition of opponents including the American Civil Liberties Union, Disability Rights California, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty say there isn’t enough data to justify expanding the definition, and that putting more people into conservatorships would infringe on people’s civil rights.
The other bill, SB965, would allow a medical expert to testify in conservatorship hearings about a person’s medical records even if they were written by a different health care provider, because it’s often difficult to get all the doctors who have treated a person available to come to court for a hearing.
The advocacy organization Disability Rights California says the current system for admitting evidence in conservatorship hearings already works, and that the bill would risk admitting “unreliable evidence” that could strip people of their civil liberties, according to a legislative analysis of the bill.
The Assembly Judiciary Committee told Eggman’s office Wednesday that the bills won’t be heard in the committee’s final hearing of the year Tuesday, probably the bills’ last chance to advance, said David Stammerjohan, her chief of staff.
That will be a major setback for cities that need state laws to change so they can deal with the crisis on their streets, San Francisco Mayor London Breed told The Chronicle.
“Those people who are outside taking off their clothes or running into traffic ... people wonder why we aren’t doing anything,” Breed said. “We are overdue to begin a process that will help get these people into the treatment they desperately need.”
“People are literally dying on our streets because of untreated mental health issues. It’s time for us to do something about it.” State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco