Budgets Are Tight; This Still Seems Like a Mistake

Budgets Are Tight; This Still Seems Like a Mistake

From C.V. Nevius' March 21, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle column:

Rozelle Trizuto always takes her glasses off when she sees her daughter. She's resigned to the fact that Angela may punch her at any moment and doesn't want to keep replacing broken glasses.
Angela Trizuto is a diagnosed schizophrenic. She hears voices, thinks terrorists are spying on her and lashes out violently. She spent Thursday, her 25th birthday, in a San Francisco jail cell on suspicion of assaulting a person this week on Van Ness Avenue. On Friday, she was transferred to Marin to face an outstanding arrest warrant for separate assault and battery charges.
"Please help my daughter," her mother said Friday. "She is dangerous to herself and to others, obviously. At what point do people see that she's gravely disabled and needs to be in a locked unit?"
The problem is that California law makes that incredibly difficult. Laura's Law, under which patients can be required to take their medications, is so expensive and cumbersome that it is rarely used. And a conservatorship, in which a judge orders someone to be kept in a locked setting against their will, can be a legal nightmare.
Now, mental health advocates worry that a proposition included in May's special statewide election will further hinder efforts to help people like Angela Trizuto. Proposition 1E would redirect $460 million from mental health services to help balance the state budget. San Francisco has also cut its mental health services in light of the looming deficit here.
As local health services decline, the state must step up and deal with the tragedy of uncontrollable mental illness.
"It's a mess," said Paul Linde, who has been a psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital's Psych Emergency Services unit since 1992. "We all want to protect civil liberties, but because of the way the laws are structured, we have to say someone is a danger to others 'at this time.' They almost literally have to have a knife to someone's neck to be able to say they are dangerous."

Reading the comments on the article is also quite depressing, and a reminder of why I am glad to be far away from San Francisco:

If I see an obviously crazy person coming towards me on the street (which happens usually at least once every single day), I will cross over. I have had two acquaintances murdered by insane people in SF, and I will not be one of them. I don't care how insensitive this sounds. There is no room for sensitivity when you have dangerous, violent people roaming freely on the streets. I will probably vote against 1E, though I am suspicious at the "concern" of mental health advocates, who should be really called mental illness advocates. Governor Schwarzenegger's cuts to the mental health system are a huge mistake, and even as a Republican I can't get behind them. Judges are clearly pat of the problem, but we as a society must realize that we are not helping anyone by letting crazy people loose. Bring back asylums.