SACRAMENTO — When Julie Rodriguez drove herself and her two young children into the muddy depths of the Sacramento River last spring, she wasn't the same person her parents had raised. She had become someone else, they say, someone distorted by illness and suffering.
William and Elvira Gonzalez couldn't help her. The way they see it, they weren't allowed to.
Rodriguez, 31, refused treatment for her deepening paranoia and psychosis. And despite her family's pleas to counselors, doctors, children's protective services officials and the police, no one felt able to force her into a hospital.
"They wouldn't do [anything] unless she did something real drastic," Elvira Gonzalez said. "I said, 'Are you going to wait for a tragedy to happen? By then it will be too late!' "
Last May, Gonzalez was proved horribly right. Rodriguez, once a doting mother, ended three lives with the turn of a steering wheel. Efrain was 4, Priscilla 2.
Citing sensational crimes and lesser-known tragedies like these, as well as dramatic improvements in psychiatric medications, critics of California's commitment law want to make it easier to force resistant mental patients into treatment.
"No one wants to go back to the days when it was too easy to hospitalize someone and throw away the key," said Rosalyn Kalmar of Los Angeles, who has struggled to get care for her daughter. "But we've gone too far in the other direction."
These reformers--mostly health care providers and families of the mentally ill--face a rock wall of opposition from patients rights groups and civil libertarians. They insist that the 1969 law and subsequent protections are in place for a good reason: to prevent any repetition of past psychiatric abuses.
At issue is the strict, complex set of rules that California has developed over the past 30 years governing detention and treatment of psychiatric patients against their will. Before they were enacted, patients could be hospitalized indefinitely after what critics considered perfunctory court hearings. Hospital staff determined how long they were held.
Now, people can be committed to hospitals for evaluation only if doctors find them dangerous to themselves or others, or so gravely disabled that they can't care for their basic needs. A person can be detained for three days before a hearing must be scheduled.
