Answering a Distress Call

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave its ailing mental health system a belated transfusion of money this week, making it possible for the system to continue to help the most troubled people of the community. The board never should have allowed conditions to reach such a critical stage, but at least the supervisors are back on the right track. Now the county must hope for a similar change of heart and priorities in Sacramento, because that is where control rests over a long-term cure for what ails the system of mental health care in all California counties.

Eight county mental health centers had been forced to started closing their doors Monday because the state is short $18 million in the mental health budget. Then the state Supreme Court ruled that the county had no choice but to keep the clinics open, and on Tuesday the board committed itself to spending $3.25 million to keep the centers open through August. The money will come from revisions in property tax assessments completed earlier this fiscal year. The supervisors said that $250,000 of the money should be spent on safety training for mental health workers and alarm systems at more clinics. A security guard has now been assigned to the Santa Monica clinic where last week 36-year-old Robbyn Panitch, a psychiatric social worker, was stabbed to death.

No one pretends the crisis is over. Creating uncertainty among already disturbed people ishardly likely to calm their nerves; it also makes clinic staffs’ jobs more demanding. Hunting for little pots of money is not a long-range answer. Transferring funds from one program to another simply transfers shortages.

Mental health care for those who cannot afford to pay their own way has traditionally been a state responsibility. Until the 1960s many people with mental problems were placed in state hospitals that provided little or no care and inhumane living conditions. But when California went along with the national effort to reduce the number of people who had been warehoused in those hospitals, it created another problem by failing to provide adequate out-patient programs in communities.

As Times staff writers Anne Roark and Roxane Arnold have reported, a backlash is developing against treating the mentally ill, especially homeless people, in their communities. But the answer is not to drive everyone with mental illness back into state institutions. The homeless poke in garbage cans and mutter to themselves not because they are being treated in the community but because they are not being treated in the community. The state simply must provide the money and the vision to make long-promised programs a reality.

California government has more problems of every kind than it has money of any kind. There is a great deal of conversation in Sacramento these days about eliminating the Gann limit on state spending--starting with Gov. George Deukmejian--but there is too little action. The mental health crisis in Los Angeles County and other parts of the state is but one more specific case to which state leaders must point as they try to persuade voters of the magnitude of the challenge facing California.