OCR Text |
Show Friday, Jan. II, 2008 Opinion 13 Crazy: Laws are nuts [•continued from page 12 acting up and acting out, actress Frances Farmer was locked in the madhouse and subjected to treatment that wouldn't pass muster at Gitmo. Those three legislators decided to stop it. Frank Lanterman, Nick Pelris and Alan Short made seminal laws that give mental patients , rights and make it much harder to lock them up for long periods against their will. The laws ended the "warehousing" of the mentally ill , and encouraged more humane, individual, local care. California's mental health dollars were supposed to follow patients back home, to clinics and board-and-care residences. It didn't always work that way. Gov. Ronald Reagan famously used the new rules to close state hospitals and whack the mental health budget, a combination that turned the streets and sometimes the jails into de facto mental institutions as people, left untreated, crossed the line from irrational to illegal. In 2004, Californians voted for Proposition 63, a 1 percent tax on millionaires to expand mental health services. Richard Scheffler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, calls it "a kind of Robin Hood tax" for a "starved" mental health system. Spears might be the first person who both pays the tax and benefits from it. But even taxing all ol California's millionaires can't remedy the flaws in the well-intentioned Magna Carta for the mentally ill. Before those reforms were passed, Petris was rightly appalled by how casually someone could be locked away after a fiveminute hearing before a judge. "A guy walking down the street, talking to himselt, could be thrown in a hospital," he said years ago. Acting irrationally - say, whacking a car with your umbrella or shaving your head, as Spears has done - could have gotten her committed for years. Yet, as Petris himself later found, "we moved from a stage where people were being railroaded and there were no standards to a situation where people (are) not getting treated because (commitment) standards are rigid." It's the Catch-22 of California law: Can the mentally ill always know what's best for them? Do the mentally ill have the right to self-destruct? What, I wonder, would a Britney's Law look like? Would it make it easier to require treatment, especially if the outburst gets 100,000 hits on YouTube? Or maybe those of us who get our jollies watching human celebrity train wrecks could get Iree evaluations to find out just what's wrong with us. Buy One Whole Sub of Choice & Two 32 oz. Drinks & I Get a Whole " KELSEY'S PiziaSub I PIZZA &SUBS nTh e Bread and Crust V i c w * 661N. MAIN 752-3525 FREE Not valid whh other offers Coupon Expires 10/07/07 <JTi J* —-— T 78E-400N. next to Hastings 753-6463 GRIST 981 S. Main next to Macey's 755-0262 BREAD COMPANY Buy any loaf Get 3 Bagels FRE Papa's Perfect Pizza! $ Mozzarella, Cheddar, & Provolone topped with 1/2 Pepperoni & 1/2 Hawaiian TAKE'N BAKE PIZZA ' 618 N. Main 755-0808 Not valid with any other offers. Expires 12/31/07 Pat Morrison is a Los Angeles Times columnist and host ot a daily public-affairs show on Los Angeles public radio. m r: • qiner new education loans a more intelligent way to handle school tuition matching students and financial needs Federal student loans. Alternative education loans. Educational debt C o n s o l i d a t i o n . Get what you need with mChoice from Mountain America: no origination fees, lower rates, quick approval and personal service. Visit your local branch or call 1 -800-748-4302 ext 6130. Loans subject to credit approval. MOUNTAIN C R E D.,,I vT www.macu.c fiS |