Mental Health

Everyone around Mark Rippee - a homeless man with a brain injury and paranoid schizophrenia — saw this coming. Nobody managed to stop it.

In his State of the State speech, Gavin Newsom calls for forcing more people into treatment, changing state spending rules, simplifying treatment paths, and linking housing and services.

California inches toward making it easier to compel treatment for mental illness, but serious questions remain. Among them: Do treatment options even exist?

Striking clinicians — spotlighting complaints that patients with serious mental illness face long waits and inadequate care — lay blame at the doorstep of the state Department of Managed Health Care.

Laws require health plans to provide patients equal treatment for mental and physical needs. But "parity" is often elusive — and critics say the Legislature and health officials have failed to fix the problem.

As more Americans seek help for symptoms of mental illness, the healthcare industry can’t keep pace with demand. In California, the largest de facto mental institution is now the Los Angeles County jail. All too often, the criminal justice system is the first stop toward getting long-term care. A few decades ago, fewer than half […]

In California, geography creates significant barriers for people seeking early psychosis intervention and other treatment, because its 58 counties have 58 different public mental health programs, each with its own set of covered services. That's by design. Yet it creates troubling inequities.

A physician, an advocate, a public health specialist, a suicide-attempt survivor and a California state lawmaker gathered in downtown Sacramento today to offer their diagnosis of the state’s mental health system. The consensus: “We need to start from scratch.”

With fresh political attention on mental health, advocates are hoping California embraces humane and effective ways of averting some problems and solving others.