Help for the Helpless

All too often, mentally ill people on the streets of Los Angeles are unable to cope with the complexities of applying for welfare benefits to which they are entitled. Los Angeles County has not been as responsive to their needs as it should have been, and now Superior Court Judge John L. Cole has told the county to shape up.

Acting in a case filed by several public-interest law firms, Cole gave the county until Aug. 22 to develop a plan to identify and help the mentally ill apply for general relief benefits. Studies have shown that as many as one-third of the homeless in the Skid Row area are mentally ill, yet only about 8% get welfare benefits. The process is too complex for them. Applicants may be kept waiting in situations in which they are uncomfortable to fill out forms that they can’t comprehend with information that they no longer remember. “I don’t understand some of the forms myself,” the judge confessed.

If the county wants to maintain the complexity of its forms--and there may be some great inner need for all that information--that’s fine. But welfare offices must have trained people able to spot someone in need of special help when he or she walks in the door, and then must provide that help.

Cole summed it up well: No one eligible for general-relief benefits should be denied them “because his mental disability--the very condition that probably caused him to need those benefits--prevents him from filling out the forms.”

It should not have taken a lawsuit to win help for those who need it in tackling the welfare bureaucracy. But it did, and at least Cole has handed down a humane judgment.