Moms are right: Disability lobby should reconsider opposition to Newsom’s CARE Court | Opinion

Every one of the mothers and others — and there were lots of mothers — marching through downtown Sacramento this week carrying a sign that said, “Hospitals not jails,” or “Untreated psychosis kills,” has lived a health care horror story.

Those stories, of trying for years to get treatment for loved ones too mentally ill to know they need it, ought to be enough to get the powerful civil rights and disability lobbies to reconsider their determination to keep Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court concept from ever even being tried.

One woman told me her son with a serious brain disorder has been in solitary confinement in a county jail for four years. You know, getting the very latest in care as of the year of our Lord 1292.

Jennifer Williams was wearing a shirt with her daughter Maddie Delaney’s face on it. Maddie died last year, at age 38, near the Modesto shelter where she’d been staying. She fell asleep outside and was run over by a driver who didn’t stop. “The voices won’t leave me alone,” she’d told her mother the last time they met.

But by God, as Williams’ shirt notes, “she died with her rights on,” blessedly uninfringed upon by the treatment that civil rights and disability groups say should never be imposed on those whose illness keeps them from realizing that they need it.

Linda Mimms, who is from San Diego County, was wearing a coat covered with the names of seriously mentally ill Californians who have likewise died on our streets or in our jails in recent years.

Susan Partovi, a street doctor in Los Angeles, said she was recently attacked by a homeless woman who was walking around completely naked yet was deemed “unholdable” — somehow not sick enough to be treated without the permission she was in no shape to give.

Under the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act that Newsom recently signed into law, a family member, first responder or anyone else would be able to petition a new kind of civil court to temporarily mandate and provide housing and care for a person with an untreated and incapacitating mental illness.

In their petition attempting to block the law from ever going into effect, disability and civil rights groups claim that this would rob desperately sick people of their rights by limiting their “autonomy in choosing their medical provider and where and with whom they live.”

Only, as I’ve written before, what medical provider? Does anyone who has met a seriously mentally ill person think they are choosing anything at all in the full flower of freedom? Those the CARE Court is designed to help lost their autonomy to their disease long ago.

At the Tuesday march in support of the CARE Court law, advocates for their mentally ill loved ones rallied in front of the K Street office of Disability Rights California, or DRC, which is trying to block the program and yet is part of the working group on how to implement it.

Despite their righteous anger at the lobby that’s fighting any deviation from the orthodoxy that’s literally killing their kids, most of the moms I talked to acknowledged that advocates for civil rights and for the disabled do a lot of heroic work.

But in trying to block help for some of the most vulnerable Californians, they also happen to be wrong.

No one would come out of the building and talk to the group, or listen to them. So they just yelled at the building from outside, which of course is where many of their loved ones live.

“Educate yourselves!” shouted Mimm. “You’re fighting for the wrong thing, and causing needless death and suffering!”

The woman whose son is in solitary confinement, who didn’t even want me to say where he is out of fear that that would only make his situation worse, said she called DRC before her son’s arrest, desperate for help. “They said he has to call. I said he doesn’t even know he’s ill.”

It’s hard for a lobby to admit to being mistaken, because there’s not only pride, but power at stake.

The lives that continue to be lost are more important, yet the advocates for those likely to die homeless and alone are left standing on the sidewalk, shouting at nobody, just like their loved ones.

This story was originally published February 16, 2023 at 5:00 AM.