Honoring Laura’s Legacy

“Involuntary commitment.” Without any context, the term sounds chilling, a throwback to half a century ago, when greedy relatives or uncaring communities sometimes confined people to state psychiatric hospitals simply because they were misfits. There, they were controlled with medications that often turned patients into virtual zombies, blurring their vision, stiffening their muscles and dulling their memories.

Such “snake pits” have been shuttered for decades, and psychiatric medications have come on the market that clarify rather than stupefy the mind.

Now, some 40 years after abusive practices were halted, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Current law prohibits the forced medication of the mentally ill unless they are deemed in immediate danger of harming themselves or others. That rigid standard has left law enforcement and mental health professionals, not to mention families, without any way of helping people before a serious mental illness spirals into tragedy.

Just ask the family of Laura Wilcox, a 19-year-old high school valedictorian who was gunned down a year and a half ago in the Northern California town of Nevada City by a man whose delusional schizophrenia had gone untreated.

After four years of uphill fighting by Assemblywoman Helen Thomson (D-Davis), California appears to be on the threshold of passing a law that will respect crucial civil liberties while allowing authorities to use common sense in treating the mentally ill who resist help because they are mentally ill.

After much debate between civil libertarians, family members and mental health professionals, all of them proposing conflicting amendments to the bill, the Legislature has arrived at a wise compromise: to allow involuntary treatment of people in need of help and unable to make rational decisions concerning care. The decision would be made by judges after careful consultation with mental health professionals and family members.

The final bill deftly balances an individual’s right to freedom with society’s responsibility to protect the safety and foster the health of all its citizens. The full Senate will vote on the bill, AB 1421, as early as today. The Senate should resoundingly approve it and Gov. Gray Davis should sign it, making “Laura’s law,” for so long a noble aspiration, a reality.