California Governor is Right About Mental Illness and Addiction

Laws need to be changed to force people into treatment

Mark and I were waiting for the bus in San Francisco when a dirty, unshaven, disheveled white man missing a front tooth started throwing potato chips at us and yelling things like “that’s all you get,” and “if you take a picture of me with that camera, I’m gonna stab you with my machete.” We looked the other way and tried not to engage.

When the bus came, we all got on and he continued to focus on and threaten us about the cameras we were both carrying. We ignored him, looking at the floor or out the window. So did everyone sitting nearby, except the fit young white man who stage whispered scornfully, “Why don’t you go do some more meth?” And later called loudly, “I hope you get the help you need, man.” That put everyone on alert. Would the crazy man come for us?

Luckily, not this time. He didn’t move to the back of the bus where we were sitting to start physical violence. Instead, he announced where he’d be getting off and invited Mark and the young man to get off there and fight him. When he finally exited, everyone in the back breathed a sigh of relief. Those who happened to look out the window as we pulled away from the curb were treated to the sight of him zipping down his fly and waving his dick at the retreating bus.

Crazy people threaten public spaces

We’ve had encounters with crazy people on the bus three times in the last week. One time we had our one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter with us. We probably won’t be bringing her on the bus again, even though she loves buses and finds riding them an adventure, and even though riding public transit to parks or points of interest is a cheap and fun entertainment for families. But Muni doesn’t feel like a safe environment for children right now. That time, nothing terrible happened. But having an obviously psychotic man sitting near us and our tiny, vulnerable granddaughter made me nervous.

Besides trying to ignore crazy people on the bus, maneuvering past them on sidewalks all over town, and seeing them shit and pee and strew garbage on the street around their tents, not to mention used needles, I read stories in the press about how they are seriously harming innocent people.

An old white man walking his dog in Glen Park was beaten to death in 2020 by a homeless white man who had a thing about dogs. People in the neighborhood had called the police about this mentally ill man multiple times, since he often threatened people walking their dogs. Police approached him and offered him services, but he didn’t accept. One story said he lived in a planter box in the park. And despite interaction with police multiple times, he continued to live there and threaten people, until he killed a sweet old widower who had lived nearby for 50 years and was beloved by his neighbors.

Another story that got a lot of press was when a homeless white man attacked an old Chinese woman who was waiting for a bus downtown in 2021. She beat him off with her cane, but sustained serious injuries. Later, her grandchildren set up a Go Fund Me account which raised close to a million dollars for her medical expenses and more. People hate what’s happening. People want to help. The woman donated all the money to organizations trying to stop hate crimes against Asians, despite living in low-income Chinatown and having little money herself.

Laws that shield the mentally ill are a shell game

Current laws state that people with mental illness can’t be taken into custody against their will unless they are “a danger to themselves or others.” But different police departments interpret those words different ways. I have a son with a major mental illness and have called the police multiple times (three last year) to help me get him into the hospital when he needs psychiatric care. It’s always a crap shoot.

Sometimes police will take him to the hospital. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll be gentle. Sometimes they’ll be rough. Different departments interpret the law differently. So do different individual officers. Police might be responsive to a mother’s cry for help in one town but dismissive in the next.

When I do call police, I always fear a bad outcome. A mother in the suburban town where we raised our three kids called her son’s psychiatrist when he was beating his head against the wall and wouldn’t stop. The psychiatrist told her to call the police and ask for help in getting him into the hospital, which she did. When police arrived, the son ran around the side of the house carrying a steak knife and they shot him dead.

I’ve been told that the PD in that same suburban town has a unit specially-trained for dealing with people with mental illness. But when I called one time and asked for that unit, I was reprimanded by the dispatcher. “You don’t get to decide who answers the call.”

Another time police trained the red light of a taser on my son’s sunken chest as he knelt in handcuffs in our living room.

Even if you are lucky enough to get humane officers who recognize that running naked down the street is a danger to yourself — so, by the way, is shooting drugs on the street; living under a bush; threatening strangers; sleeping in filth; waving your dick in public; and being unable to put a coherent sentence together — and agree to take your loved one to the hospital, chances are, they will be released in three days.

That’s because current law only allows the hospital to hold people who’ve been brought in against their will for three days for observation. After that, a judge must be called in if the hospital wants to hold the patient longer. And if the patient can act normal for three minutes, he’s released.

Besides, the hospital doesn’t want to keep him anyway, even if he is still very clearly insane. That’s because there aren’t enough beds. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, the United States has eliminated 97 percent of the psychiatric hospital beds it had in 1955. One result is people with severe mental illness are living on the street. Another result is people with severe mental illness are being put in jail, which is more expensive than hospitalization and far less humane.

Without access to hospital care, acutely ill individuals deteriorate, families and caregivers buckle under stress, ERs fill with acutely ill patients waiting for a bed to open and police and fire responders find themselves increasingly diverted to mental health calls. By 2014, 10 times more people with serious mental illness were in prisons and jails than in state mental hospitals, a circumstance widely attributed to the shortage of beds to provide timely treatment.

One reason psychiatric beds have been eliminated is greed. No one wants to pay what it costs to take care of chronically sick people. Conservatives disallowed committing people against their will under the aegis of “freedom” — people should have the freedom to be mentally ill. Right. One walk through the Tenderloin in San Francisco, where people with mental illness and drug addiction (another form of mental illness) live in filth on the street, tells you that kind of “freedom” is bullshit.

Another reason is the idea that asylums are terrible places to live. But the solution to that problem is to fix the asylums, not to turn people with severe mental illness out onto the street, or cage them in jail instead.

I’m in the habit of blaming Ronald Reagan for shutting down our state hospitals when he was governor of California in 1967–1975. But this article in Salon.com says he was continuing a trend.

Beginning in the late 1950s, California became the national leader in aggressively moving patients from state hospitals to nursing homes and board-and-care homes, known in other states by names such as group homes, boarding homes, adult care homes, family care homes, assisted living facilities, community residential facilities, adult foster homes, transitional living facilities, and residential care facilities. Hospital wards closed as the patients left. By the time Ronald Reagan assumed the governorship in 1967, California had already deinstitutionalized more than half of its state hospital patients. That same year, California passed the landmark Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, which virtually abolished involuntary hospitalization except in extreme cases. Thus, by the early 1970s California had moved most mentally ill patients out of its state hospitals and, by passing LPS, had made it very difficult to get them back into a hospital if they relapsed and needed additional care. California thus became a canary in the coal mine of deinstitutionalization.

Regardless of who’s to blame, it’s clear the system isn’t working, despite the fact that voters approve funds to solve homelessness and provide mental health care on every ballot measure offered, and LOTS of money is spent trying to fix it — the San Francisco Department of Homelessness has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Newsom proposes a radical shift

Now California Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a new way of handling people with serious mental health and/or drug addiction problems. He wants to set up a separate court system that can require them to seek treatment. In a press release issued March 3, Newsom dubbed the new judicial system CARE Court. It still has to be approved by the legislature, and I, for one will be writing my representatives to beg them to agree.

This system sounds like what they did in Portugal when they discovered a large number of their adult children were addicted to heroin. Instead of throwing them in jail or leaving them on the street, which is heartless and inhumane and precisely what we’re doing now in San Francisco, they mandated treatment. The results were good.

I care about people who have drug use or mental health issues. I want them to get the treatment they need and deserve. I also care about being able to enjoy living in my city.

I don’t want to be bullied or threatened on the bus. I don’t want to be afraid to take a walk in a park. I don’t want to see filthy people, half dressed, with open wounds, sleeping and suffering cruelly on the street. And when I do see those people, I don’t want to give them money, because I know it isn’t going to help.

I want these poor, lost rejects of society to get professional help — medication, counseling, housing. So do most people. Gavin Newsom’s proposal is a step in the right direction. I hope and pray we can get this done.

For further reading…

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