Plight of the Mentally Ill Homeless in L.A.
After 17 years of involvement in the plight of the mentally ill homeless, largely because of a chronically psychotic daughter, I am absolutely fed up with reading articles like Bill Boyarsky’s (Opinion, Jan. 12), “The Mentally Ill Homeless: Minus Both Housing and Hospitals.”
Like others, this well-intended and well-written article serves to make the public more aware of the magnitude of the problem but they diffuse the “blame” into some vague socio-economic-political failure with no explanation; no solutions are ever offered other than to spend more public money to feed and house them.
I am financially able and willing to pay for psychiatric care and hospitalization for my daughter; she does not have to be the Skid Row inhabitant that she is. I do not require financial help at the city, county, state or federal level to provide her with the treatment that she needs to return to a productive role in society. Yet I cannot do so under the law.
The barriers to my daughter receiving the help she needs are:
1--She denies any illness and prefers to live on the street; for doing so she receives federal “disability” funds, SSI (Supplemental Security Income), coming out of the Social Security (welfare) system; she denies “disability” when in courts or hospitals or jails but claims it when it comes to surviving on the street.
2--The mental health law (Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1968, enacted when Ronald Reagan was governor) makes impossible the provision of mental health therapy or even control if the sick person rejects such and asserts his or her civil rights.
The only way that a parent or other caring and responsible person can impose such control is by obtaining a “conservatorship” through the offices of the Public Guardian and a decree in Superior Court (Department 95 in this county).
In Los Angeles County, but not in all other counties, the Public Guardian may, under the law as that office interprets the law, prevent a conservatorship hearing by the court and often evades its responsibilities to assume conservatorship when it is not feasible for the family to do so. I can provide specific evidence to this effect in the dealings I had with that office in my daughter’s case.
For these reasons I think that articles like the one by Boyarsky, by implying lack of funds or public concern over this issue of the mentally ill homeless, entirely miss the crucial point that the law is the real culprit.
The law prohibits anything constructive being done for psychotic persons who deny that they are ill and who profess their civil right to be “free” to live on the streets and are payed to do so. As long as the law and its implementation are as defective as they are at the present, the County Board of Supervisors is impotent, regardless of its political persuasion and how much public money is allocated to the problem.
The mentally ill homeless will continue to comprise a significant and increasing segment of our society. Although articles like this, no doubt, serve to acquaint more citizens with the scope of the issue, why can’t the print media publish more about the real culprit in this societal mess, i.e., mental health law and how the laws we have are so unevenly and poorly implemented?
CHARLES G. CRADDOCK MD
Los Angeles
