Court Orders Plan to Help Mentally Ill Get Welfare

Calling the welfare application process “a massive bureaucracy” that is ensnaring many of those it is designed to help, a Superior Court judge Wednesday ordered Los Angeles County to prepare a plan to help the mentally disabled apply for general relief benefits.

The order, which gives the county until Aug. 22 to comply, was issued by Judge John L. Cole in response to a suit brought by a coalition of legal aid groups that claim that thousands of mentally ill residents of Los Angeles are without food and shelter because they do not know how to apply for help.

“It would be monstrous, sort of a great big Catch-22, if somebody eligible to receive general relief benefits was denied those benefits because his mental disability--the very condition that probably caused him to need those benefits--prevents him from filling out the forms,” Cole declared.

Some of the application forms “appall me,” the judge said.

“I don’t understand some of the forms myself,” he said.

Studies submitted to the court--some of them prepared by the county--show that as many as a third of the homeless population in the Skid Row area, and more than 70% of the women there, are severely or chronically mentally ill.

Only 8% Get Relief

Yet only about 8% of the homeless in the area are obtaining general relief, the county’s last-resort, $247-a-month welfare program for those who are in need but ineligible for other assistance programs. The majority indicated that they had tried to apply for welfare at least once but were discouraged by the “complexity of the process,” the studies show.

“The judge has clearly recognized and informed the county that the system isn’t working,” said Joel R. Reynolds, attorney for the Center for Law in the Public Interest, which brought the suit along with Mental Health Advocacy Services Inc., the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, the American Civil Liberties Union and other public interest law firms.

The suit was filed in April on behalf of a mentally retarded man and a schizophrenic who said they had tried to apply for general relief--a program that will provide an estimated $110 million in cash, plus other assistance, to about 40,000 clients this year--but were discouraged.

“I got an application and started to fill it out and was about to hand it in, when I decided to leave,” said Robert Rensch in a declaration filed with the court. “I was nervous about being in the . . . office. Too many people and so many things going on with them made me nervous.”

Jose Garcia, 33, told the court that he tried to apply for relief three times but was turned away because he had no birth certificate and did not know how to obtain one.

“In the welfare office, I felt like an alien or a piece of meat being pushed around,” he said. “Nobody took time to help me fill the application out. I can’t read or spell very well.”

County officials say they will spend an estimated $170 million on programs for the homeless this year and have already adopted a number of programs designed especially to help the homeless mentally ill.

Moreover, welfare eligibility workers are trained to recognize mentally disabled applicants and give them special help in applying for aid, Deputy County Counsel Mary Wawro said.

“This is a social phenomenon that this society is just really beginning to grapple with, and Los Angeles is a mecca for these people who haven’t been able to find help anywhere else,” Wawro told the judge.

The problem is twofold, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued: Applicants are required to fill out a two-page screening form and an 11-page public assistance application, which they claim are written at the 12th-grade reading level. Yet, they say, in most cases there are no welfare workers available or willing to help complete the applications--an assertion that the county denies.

Most applicants then have to go around to various government offices and obtain affidavits showing that they have the required state identification and are not eligible for any other public assistance programs, a process that requires most applicants to complete at least 15 forms, Reynolds said.

Cole scheduled a Sept. 5 hearing to review whatever plan for dealing with the problem the county submits. He will then decide whether to issue an injunction ordering the county to implement the plan.