conserve the homeless

Recently SF county mayor London Breed has proposed a plan to extend the law for conservatorship to those living on the street. They wish to include chronic homelessness as a criteria in considering whether a person should be placed on conservatorship. Currently the conservatorship laws in place serve the gravely disabled in a hospital setting. This fails to account for those who are chronically ill and are moving through the revolving door of mental hospitals, jail, and homelessness. Personally I disagree with this decision because homelessness depends on a variety of factors. Also, being homeless can lead to depression and lack of drive to take care of oneself unrelated to mental illness. The person simply gives up on trying due to perceived lost hope. There is an important idea to understand and that is the concept of the revolving door in mental illness. You will hear about how the chronically mentally ill persons will revolve from hospital to street and or jail. It is a common picture. A mentally ill person with bipolar is discharged from the hospital with medication and instructions on following up with outpatient or their psychiatrist. They fail to take their meds after a while. Their symptoms return. They fail to see that they are relapsing and not functioning as well. Once they relapse, they may be found and placed on a 5150. They return to the hospital to be stabilized. Then they are discharged after a 14 day hold or so, but the same pattern continues. Or perhaps they relapse and perform a dangerous violent action against someone else. Then they are taken and booked at the county jail. This is known as the revolving door in the mental health community because the person struggles to escape that pattern thus "revolving door".. This is the purpose of why LPS conservatorship was created along with reducing the number of people in state hospitals. However, I think that it is a stretch to conserve people off the streets. It is very challenging to know why they were homeless in the first place. The counties are stripped for money and it is very challenging for the case managers to add more conservatees to their case load. To properly extend the conservatorship laws to cover the homeless, more financial assistance should be granted to the counties to allow them to perform more extensive investigations.


https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/London-Breed-urges-lawmakers-to-boost-homeless-13035677.php