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Congratulations on your re-election, Mayor Newsom!
Please make your second-term priority to revisit the issue of enforcing and funding Laura’s Law.
You have cited "institutional resistance" for holding back on your promise to do so. You overcame social forces against supporting equal marriage rights for gay couples because it was the right thing to do. I applaud that decision.
Funding and enforcing Laura’s Law is right in keeping with your commitment to reduce homelessness and match our destitute and severely mentally ill residents with the services they need. Please do not allow any more psych bed reductions at SFGH. Please support Assertive Outpatient Treatment, and continue to support voluntary treatment and Mental Health Courts.
You began with Care not Cash. Lets progress to Care not Jail for the severely mentally ill, so visible and reviled by more and more people who don’t understand that they are suffering not from an attitude problem, as some believe, but from bona fide diseases of the brain that make it impossible for them to find their way of the labyrinth they’ve fallen into without the medical help they often resist.
We need a tiered system for many of the neediest if we are ever to make any progress. Many begin fith the police taking them on a 5150 to emergency care and evaluation at SFGH. If stabilized somewhat, but their situation is still precarious mandating continued monitoring and medication and/or therapy adjustments, assertive outpatient treatment, or an involuntary mandate, will be necessary. We need to have hospital beds consistent with the need in our city, AOTs (Assertive, or Assistive Outpatient Treatment) as well as ADUs, (Acute Diversionary Units), for those who will voluntarily follow a prescribed course of treatment. People sent to ADUs must also be tracked. If they relapse, they would profit from more assertive monitoring.
If you see to it that a proper care and monitoring system is put into place, I guarantee you will reduce the homeless population. You have helped people capable of understanding and accepting the social services offered. Now help the people with the severest mental illnesses while they can still be helped. The longer a person with mental illness goes untreated, the more difficult it is to help them recover.
How is it that those who say, "we won’t help because people have the right to be crazy and there is no money for treatment," turn around and say, "spend millions on citations to secure MY quality of life and get them off MY front steps because MY rights are being violated by the inconvenience and mess of it all." What about the quality of life of the severely mentally ill? We consign them to the streets, and lock them up in overcrowded jails, in spite of protests from police and guards and the medical community. Why is being locked up in an overcrowded jail with felons OK with some people, but a hospital lock-up with therapy is cruel? That shouldn’t make sense because it doesn’t make sense.
This problem of how to care for the insane was visited in the mid 19th century, when it was concluded that so long as state law permitted the incarceration of madwomen and madmen, the state would be guilty of violating the federal Constitution by subjecting the insane to false imprisonment and cruel and unusual punishment.
By improving the quality of life of the severely mentally ill in our communities, you improve the quality of life for every San Franciscan. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the only sensible thing to do. The incessant pattern we see, a revolving door in and out of jail, in and out of court, dozens of ineffective citations that will never be paid by indigent, incoherent people, will continue to cost millions and millions and achieve nothing. Set an example for the rest of the state and the rest of the nation which has completely lost its way and failed miserably to fulfill it’s obligations to victims of mental illness. We must not promote a vicious picture of the insane as villains who must be pushed from one srteet corner to the other, but see them as victims in dire need of rescue and compassion.
Be my hero, Mayor Newsom!
Ellie
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