Here’s The Main Solution To Solving The Mental Health Crisis

Quick Weather Update

You don’t need a weatherman to know it’s been hotter than hell for a long spell.
In fact, I think we may have set a record for sustained days exceeding 100 degrees.
As always, I welcome the wisdom of our elders if they have information to the contrary.
So here are the temps for the past consecutive 8 days, all exceeding the century mark.

July 2 103
July 3 108
July 4 107
July 5 110
July 6 114
July 7 111
July 8 109
July 9 103

Let me know if you or anybody you know, has information on consecutive, above 100 degree days.

Geiger’s Closes Hopland Grocery Store

Well, can’t say it comes as any surprise but a Hopland acquaintance emailed me with the news that the Geiger’s Hopland grocery store shuttered its doors this past Sunday. She said other than a cursory post on social media, “No other kind of warning or public notice was given. What a way to not run a business. But you guys already had the same experience, except now you’ve got your store back and about to re-open under new ownership. Thanks for keeping us informed with your articles, you’re the best we know. Don’t you go and close down your writing business, then we really would be in trouble!”

As I said recently, the new owner, Haji Alam, of the newly re-named “Laytonville Long Valley Market,” appeared at our Town Advisory Council meeting on June 26, making a presentation and answering questions from the public. He’s also been on my radio show explaining his re-opening plans and other related matters.

The target date for re-opening is around July 15th

Alam is very personable, open and frank in his conversations, and quite engaging.

I’ve been able to verify that most, if not all, former Market employees have been contacted regarding job offers, and currently many employees are now busy preparing the store to re-open the doors

Alam also said he plans to apply for a County permit to open and operate six-pump gas station on the Market’s property. Of course, this proposed project will have to go through the County’s Planning and Building process for final approvals. At the meeting, Alam and some of the attendees discussed in some detail operational plans for the gas station, including how to route vehicles from the parking lot onto Highway 101.

I believe most folks in the Laytonville area would support and will welcome a second gas station since there’s definitely an established need for one.

The Most Important Step To Start Solving The Mental Health Treatment Crisis

I told you several weeks ago a reader sent me an email: “Thank you so much for the very thorough article (“Who Closed Mental Health Hospitals In California?”) about the history of mental health issues in California. I am wondering if you might offer another follow up article on possible real life solutions to the issues?”

So here we go.

Over the weekend, there were a number of posts on the Anderson Valley Advertiser website regarding long-standing mental health issues.

One post alleged that Pat Brown was governor, not Ronald Reagan when historic legislation created what was thought to be a model law for reforming mental treatment in California.

Speaking as a historian let me assure you that Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California in November of 1966, defeating incumbent Pat Brown.

Two legislative forces actually determined the fate of mental health care in this state. You might call them acts with unintended consequences. Here’s the condensed history.

Reagan had only been in office a few months in 1967, when the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act (LPS Act) a so-called “bill of rights” for those with mental health problems passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly 77-1. The Senate approved it by similar margins. Then-Gov. Reagan signed it into law.

It was co-authored by California State Assemblyman Frank Lanterman, a Republican, and California State Senators Nicholas C. Petris and Alan Short, both Democrats. LPS went into full effect on July 1, 1972.

I recently read a piece by Vern Pierson (El Dorado County District Attorney), and learned something I was not aware of: The movement of the “de-institutionalization” of the mentally ill started in the 1960’s. This movement, started in Europe, was supported by President John Kennedy and ultimately was complicated by a U.S. Supreme Court opinion and civil liberty concerns over forced treatment. Pierson has my respect, he’s one well-rounded D.A.

Anyway, the California bi-partisan law came about because of concerns about the involuntary civil commitment to mental health institutions in California. At the time, the act was thought by many to be a progressive blueprint for modern mental health commitment procedures, not only in California, but in the United States.

Its main purposes were:

• To end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of mentally disordered persons, people with developmental disabilities, and persons impaired by chronic alcoholism, and to eliminate legal disabilities;
• To provide prompt evaluation and treatment of persons with serious mental disorders or impaired by chronic alcoholism;
• To guarantee and protect public safety;
• To safeguard individual rights through judicial review;
• To provide individualized treatment, supervision, and placement services by a conservatorship program for gravely disabled persons;
• To encourage the full use of all existing agencies, professional personnel and public funds to accomplish these objectives and to prevent duplication of services and unnecessary expenditures;
• To protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts.

The second force at work in the mental health care issue were the courts and what is known as “deinstitutionalization.”

During the 1960s, many people began accusing the state mental hospitals of violating the civil rights of patients. Some families did, of course, commit incorrigible teenagers or eccentric relatives to years of involuntary confinement and unspeakable treatment. To get the picture, think of the movie “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and the sadistic Nurse Ratchett. The new law ended the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will.

By the late 1960s, the idea that the mentally ill were not so different from the rest of us, or perhaps were even a little bit more sane, became trendy. Reformers dreamed of taking the mentally ill out of the large institutions and housing them in smaller, community-based residences where they could live more productive and fulfilling lives.

A mental patient could be held for 72 hours only if he or she engaged in an act of serious violence or demonstrated a likelihood of suicide or an inability to provide their own food, shelter or clothing due to mental illness. But 72 hours was rarely enough time to stabilize someone with medication. Only in extreme cases could someone be held another two weeks for evaluation and treatment.

As a practical matter, involuntary commitment was no longer a legal option that created a whole new dilemma: How do you make a sick person better who refuses help? By definition a mentally ill person is incapable of making rational decisions concerning their health.

The LPS Act emptied out the state’s mental hospitals but resulted in an explosion of homelessness. Legislators never provided enough money for community-based programs to provide treatment and shelter.

Lanterman later expressed regret at the way the law was carried out. “I wanted the law to help the mentally ill,” he said. “I never meant for it to prevent those who need care from receiving it.”

But that’s exactly what has happened for the past five decades

As I'm always saying, problems just don't happen, people make them happen. But the history of mental health practice and policy in this state is one of abject failure caused by well-intentioned reformers back in the late 60s-early 70s who unknowingly unleashed something that no one envisioned or wanted.

The primary action to cure this ill has always been right in front of us. But it's been blocked from both view and implementation by a brick wall of political correctness combined with government capitulation to the Homeless-Mental Health Industrial Complex. Here in Mendocino County think “Schraeders” and you’ll know everything you need to know about what I’m saying.

The solution?

You have to re-introduce a meaningful, no-nonsense, balanced level of compulsion into the system so that we are not, as Assemblyman Lanterman so aptly put it many years ago, “preventing those who need care from receiving it.”

Absent that action, you’re left with what we have now: Decades of chaotic failure where the only success found is on the bottom-lines of the balance sheets of the Homeless-Mental Health Industrial Complex. Now that is true craziness.

Time to change all that don’t you think?

(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)