Helping the Mentally Ill

The column by George Vernez regarding mental health services for the homeless was right on target (“Living on Local Streets, Unhoused and Unstable,” Opinion, Aug. 7). But what he did not say has even greater impact. All the mentally ill could benefit from what he proposes for those who live on the streets. The sad truth is that our nonfunctioning, underfunded care services for these people have abandoned too many of them to the streets. But try to change an inept “non-system” into a streamlined system and you run right into the keepers of the status quo at the California Department of Mental Health and some among the leadership of the Conference of Local Mental Health Directors.

For the past two years I have chaired a blue ribbon, bipartisan task force of citizens who have looked deeply into California’s wasteful way of using taxpayer funds by the millions while maintaining a non-system that poorly serves some 250,000 seriously mentally ill. We have recommended to the Legislature the creation of a pilot Integrated Service Agencies.

Among other things these ISAs would provide much of what Vernez suggests; assisting people to quickly get help to which they are entitled, finding appropriate housing, coming up with individualized treatment plans, getting timely medical and psychiatric care before they are in acute crisis, and all the while being treated as people not things. But our proposed Integrated System goes too far. It holds funded agencies accountable, calls for independent evaluation of their effectiveness, and opens up a bidding process for competitive proposals from non-governmental care-giving agencies, and that strikes real fear into those who are doing just fine personally with the current state of affairs.

Although 46 senators and assemblymen came on as co-authors of our bills (SB 2506 and AB 4519), and although the task force proposal was aired in 14 town meetings up and down the state where it generated strong support from families, clients and care-givers alike, the forces of status quo have, in old-fashioned closed-door meetings, amended the language of our bills into meaninglessness.

As a parent of a son who has been ill with schizophrenia for seven years and who has been exposed to L.A. County’s meager offerings and now sees his county psychiatrist for only 15 minutes twice a month, I wonder where the millions go--and just who benefits.

DAN E. WEISBURD

Chairman, Task Force for the Seriously Mentally Ill

Sacramento