San Diego Union

February 22, 1999

On a cold night last month, a homeless woman died from hypothermia on the streets of downtown San Diego.

Many times, outreach workers had tried to get her into a treatment program or other homeless service. But she wanted to stay on the streets, where she could drink.

She was so frequently seen drunk in the East Village that police officers, outreach workers and others finally just left her alone. Clearly, she suffered from alcoholism, and likely from other mental disorders that often team up with substance abuse to render homeless people unable to function in mainstream life.

The sad thing is that there was nothing anybody could do to save this woman. California law allows people afflicted by mental disorders to stay on the streets until they die. Involuntary commitment for a therapeutic hospital stay for people who are a clear danger to themselves is almost impossible in this state.

But a joint Senate-Assembly committee, co-chaired by Assemblywoman Helen Thompson, D-Davis, and Sen. Wes Chesbro, D-Arcata, is examining a change in California's 30-year-old law that made involuntary treatment of mental illness virtually illegal. The reconsideration is spurred by an independent task force of doctors, police and social workers who say that not only has the law resulted in thousands of mentally ill being stranded on our streets, but it also has led to the warehousing of thousands of the mentally ill in our jails and prisons.

Prior to the passage of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, which deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and virtually barred involuntary commitment, there were approximately 35,000 patients in California's mental hospitals. Today, there about 4,000 in those hospitals, but as many as 30,000 people with mental disorders are behind bars and an equal number are on the streets.

In fact, today, the biggest mental health facilities are our jails. The Los Angeles County jail has more mental health beds than any facility of any kind in the nation. Forgive us for saying it, but that's sheer lunacy.

California shouldn't go back to the days of warehousing the mentally ill in dingy state hospitals. But the Lanterman-Petris-Short cure has been no cure at all.

Without proper treatment, some mentally ill people self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, which can lead them into crime and other self-destructive behaviors. It's estimated that up to 60 percent of people with bipolar disorders, formerly called manic-depression, abuse drugs and alcohol. That combination of pathologies is found throughout the streets of our cities and our jails and prisons.

In order to avoid new problems, this issue deserves a lot of study before the law is changed. But the joint legislative committee is definitely heading in the right direction. The current law is a failure. If you don't believe it, just look at San Diego's streets and jails.

Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.