STOCKTON – In the seven-plus years since California voters
approved the Mental Health Services Act – 2004’s Proposition 63 -
San Joaquin County officials have been working with private
providers and other public agencies to integrate the act into
core mental health services to improve lives.
That effort has paid off big time, according to the 2010-11
Mental Health Services Summary report presented Tuesday [May 8,
2012] to the Board of Supervisors by Behavioral Health
Services Director Vic Singh and private consultant Kayce Rane.
Whether forced treatment helps those with severe mental illness
or violates their rights is at the heart of the debate over a
bill passed Thursday [May 3, 2012] by the Assembly.
AB1569 extends until 2017 a law that allows courts to mandate
treatment for people with severe mental illness if they have
history of violence or hospitalization. Laura’s Law, which passed
in 2002, is set to expire next year.
California’s 58 counties are allowed to decide for themselves
whether to implement the law. Only one, Nevada County, has done
so. Counties are limited in how they can fund Laura’s Law
programs and cannot divert money from voluntary programs.
Assemblyman Mike Allen, D- Santa Rosa, said he sponsored the bill
granting the extension because counties need to be able to compel
people with severe and persistent mental illness to accept help.
“Laura’s Law is simply a tool to provide this mentally ill
population a needed treatment plan,” he said during debate on the
Assembly floor.
The families in these stories shared their experiences to help
people understand that mental illnesses are brain diseases and
should be treated as such. They asked to remain anonymous to
shield their children from the stigma of mental illness. The Bee
has given them pseudonyms or omitted their last names.
Sunday: A long, frantic journey
Today: A critical shortage of care
First came the tantrums, so wild his agitation scared his
parents.
At 3½, Bobby wasn’t sleeping through the night. By kindergarten,
he didn’t sleep at all some nights.
While the heated national debate about healthcare reform
continues, many health communities in California are quietly
making changes to prepare for the Affordable Care Act’s
implementation. Federal funding is available to help community
clinics transition towards what they will resemble in 2014.
One important change that’s taking place: community clinic are
moving towards becoming ‘medical homes,’ or centers of care. That
means qualifying low-income patients have access to primary care,
pharmacy services, or specialty care (by referral).
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ mental health care system
suffers from a culture where more importance is given to meeting
meaningless performance goals than actually helping veterans, a
former mental health administrator said in his testimony before a
Senate committee Wednesday.
The administrator, who worked at the VA medical center in
Manchester, N.H., said managers pressed the staff to develop ways
to see as many veterans as possible while providing the most
minimal mental health services possible.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said Thursday [April 19,
2012] it was increasing its staff of mental health workers
by roughly 1,900, part of an effort to anticipate medical needs
of veterans returning home from war.
The department plans to add about 1,600 clinicians, including
psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses and social workers, and
about 300 support staff to an existing mental health staff of
roughly 20,590.
Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult
disease to diagnose. Its causes remain a mystery, its symptoms
can’t be defined with precision, and treatments are spotty at
best.
But that may soon change. Scientists are looking for ways to
identify patients with depression as reliably as they diagnose
cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. A new study takes a
significant, though preliminary, step in that direction by
demonstrating that a simple blood test can distinguish between
people who are depressed and those who are not.
When Garth Webb was sent to Napa State Hospital, his parents were
relieved.
The bellboy and amateur composer from Sebastopol had been in the
throes of bipolar disorder when he was charged with threatening
the lives of co-workers. His family encouraged him to plead not
guilty by reason of insanity, thinking that in a mental hospital
he would get the treatment he needed.
Instead, Webb and his parents say, he was repeatedly brutalized.
SAN FRANCISCO — A homeless man plagued by schizophrenia is beaten
to death by police in Fullerton. A man from Fort Bragg fixates on
aliens for years while denying he is ill, then kills two men
before dying in a gunfight with law enforcement. A Nevada County
mental health client who had refused additional care storms into
a clinic and kills three workers.
Those headline grabbers, according to a task force pressing to
change the California law that governs involuntary civil
commitment to psychiatric hospitals, were merely the most visible
signs of a broken system.
Older adults often face a multitude of changes and stresses in
relation to the aging process, including health concerns,
physical limitations, financial problems, and loss of loved ones.
These changes may trigger depression, grief, a sense of isolation
and thoughts of suicide.
Who is at Risk?
Approximately every 83 minutes, one adult 65 years of age or
older commits suicide in the United States. The suicide rate for
this general age group rose by 9% between 1980 and 1992. During
that period, there were 74,675 suicides by elderly people. In
1993, suicide rates ranged from 15 per 100,000 population, among
persons 65 to 69 years old, to 24 per 100,000 population for
persons 80 to 85 years of age, a rate that is double the overall
US rate. White males are at nearly 10 times the risk for suicide
as nonwhite males across the age spectrum.
The Friendship Line is live 24-hours a day. The
toll-free number is (800) 971-0016.
About a year ago 62-year-old Linda Asberry was on the verge of
depression. She was struggling with her weight, arthritis,
diabetes, high blood pressure, gout, injuries from two
debilitating accidents and could barely make it up and down the
42 stairs to her apartment.
“I didn’t think that I had anything left to offer the world,”
said Asberry.
Then people from the organization Meals on Wheels, which brought
her food, asked if she’d like to talk with someone. She said yes,
and got the number to the Institute
on Aging’s Friendship Line.
On Sunday [March 18, 2012], the California Treatment Advocacy
Coalition released a report suggesting that a state mental health
law does not provide adequate access to treatment for people with
the most severe mental illnesses, KPCC’s “KPCC News” reports.
The report was compiled by physicians, lawyers, judges, mental
health care workers and patients over the course of 30 months.
On Tuesday [March 13, 2012], CMS awarded $75 million in funding
to California and 10 other states, as well as the District of
Columbia, for a demonstration program that will expand access to
emergency psychiatric care, The Hill’s “Healthwatch” reports.
According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health,
the majority of older Americans are able to cope effectively with
the changes commonly associated with later life. People are
reaching age 65 “in better physical and mental health than in the
past,” says the report.
What is mental health for older adults? Important aspects include
stable intellectual functioning, the ability to change and
remaining engaged with life. As we age, we tend to learn at a
slower pace and may need more repetition of new information.
Psychologists across the country have grappled for years with a
thorny problem: While every demographic group has mental health
problems, certain groups tend not to seek treatment.
Now, Sacramento County is using an infusion of state cash to try
to close that gap locally.
The county Department of Health and Human Services has contracted
community agencies across the county – one for each of eight
specific ethnic or age groups – to evaluate what mental health
services those groups need and what obstacles block them from
getting help.
According to Sacramento County’s Division of Behavioral Health
Services, one in four people will suffer from some form of mental
illness. To help encourage treatment and compassion, the
media campaign will spend $800,000 on commercials and public
service announcements this year. State Senate President Pro
Tem Darrell Steinberg co-authored the law that provided the
funding.
Mental health care for low-income adults in California is
haphazard. There is no state mandate for mental health treatment,
and individual counties set their own standards.
That’s changing, however, with a state and federal program that
brings health services similar to Medi-Cal to low-income adults
ahead of the 2014 national health care reform. The low-income
healthcare plan uses federal funds to match money spent by
counties on uninsured residents, allowing the counties to expand
coverage.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.—California has begun transitioning its mental
health services program to concentrate care on the most serious
patients residing in state mental hospitals and prisons, but the
cost-cutting move is raising concerns about patient care from
state workers.
California mental health officials on Wednesday [December
7,2011] detailed plans for a new Department of State
Hospitals, a streamlined agency that they said would improve
treatment and reduce patient violence at the troubled psychiatric
facilities — as well as save money.
Nearly 2 million adults in California — including more than
122,000 in the Sacramento region — need mental health treatment,
but the majority receive inadequate services or none at all,
despite a state law that requires health insurers to cover mental
health care, a new study shows.
