California’s landmark Mental Health Law – The LPS Act

California’s landmark Mental Health Law – The LPS Act Will Make it Easier to Detain People With Mental Illness

A proposed law would make it easier to detain people with mental illness, a step that could dramatically change how California responds to a crisis of homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (“LPS”) authorizes involuntary psychiatric treatment in very limited circumstances.

This could be a turning point in a long, hamstrung battle to get seriously mentally ill people into treatment and out of jails, prisons or overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms. Governor Gavin Newsom and key legislators are attempting to tackle a broken system that has remained entrenched, conflicting and ineffective for decades.

Despite billions of dollars in public funds, the state’s tangled blizzard of agencies and programs has long failed to deliver effective care or outcomes, leaving thousands of Californians homeless, drug-addicted or incarcerated with nowhere to turn for help. And despite a host of new laws, government reorganizations and legislative changes over the years, many local jurisdictions – and countless families – remain frustrated with the lack of progress in getting seriously mentally ill people into treatment and keeping them out of jail.

The CARE Act, which was approved by the Legislature and will become statewide in 2024, was designed to get severely mentally ill people into treatment before they were arrested. But it also was stymied by resistance from county officials who said they were not prepared to create an entire legal apparatus and provide the necessary services.

Now that the bill has cleared the Legislature, counties will be tasked with setting up new court systems to deal with people who have severe mental illness and are homeless or living in shelters or “beds” — or in jails, prisons or overcrowded hospital emergency rooms where they can’t get the help they need. But it is unclear how this will work, especially in a statewide system that has never before been unified, and many of the questions aren’t well defined.

Until recently, the state’s governing body of mental health agencies and organizations was so vast, splintered, uncoordinated and ineffective that even some of its most senior leaders didn’t know what they were doing. That’s why a joint hearing of the Assembly Health and Judiciary committees last December produced a surprisingly unified consensus on a badly broken mental health system that needs major overhaul.

Legislators, witnesses and advocates alike agreed that little has changed in the system despite decades of new laws and huge infusions of public funding. But they also argued that the system is urgently in need of major legislative change and that a special session should be held to address such an issue.

The hearing was titled, “Making California’s Mental Health System Work for Everyone.” It featured dozens of witnesses and representatives from a host of local, county and state government agencies charged with providing care and services to people with serious mental illness.

Most of the speakers supported an expansion of the vague, outdated “grave disability” standard that has governed state law for half a century, restricting interventions by local authorities to get severely mentally ill people into treatment and out of hospitals and prisons. And they urged the Legislature to consider re-establishing the state Department of Mental Health, which was abolished in 2011 after the Brown administration disbanded it.