Mental Health Services

As a former mental health worker in San Diego, I am deeply disturbed to hear of the proposed cuts in our county Mental Health Services. These drastic cuts will leave some of the treatment agencies in our communities decimated and crippled; some staffs and programs cut by over 60%, causing hundreds of people in various areas to go entirely without services. For those who will maintain their services, they will probably find them limited at best.

Re "Another kind of gun control," Opinion, May 5 David M. Kennedy's Op-Ed article saying that efforts to curtail gun violence should be focused on "hot" groups and areas, instead of on doomed legislation, was a refreshing moment of clarity in this debate. The recent massacres certainly demand a focused, spirited response, but current gun control measures being pushed do nothing to address the root causes of these horrible events. Rather than infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens, the focus should be on enforcing current laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, implementing a robust overhaul of mental health services to recognize and treat those who may have the potential to carry out mass murder, and targeting the inner-city gangs that are responsible for an outsized proportion of gun violence.

Predictably, politics has dominated the reaction and commentary about Saturday's deadly rampage in Arizona, with no shortage of wild speculation as to whether festering national divisiveness was to blame for the shootings. But it's far more likely, judging by the disjointed and delusional rantings of the alleged shooter ? and the puzzling behavior described by those who knew and feared him ? that 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner has a major mental disorder. Sure, Loughner's homicidal outburst might have been affected by anti-government rhetoric and political diatribes on the Internet or on the airwaves.

Re "Assault weapons ban advances," March 15 In supporting her bill to ban assault weapons, Sen. Dianne Feinstein recounts her experience as a San Francisco supervisor in 1978 with the senseless slayings of her colleagues Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Bringing this up in a discussion about banning assault weapons is a bit disingenuous. The gunman, former Supervisor Dan White, was an ex-police officer who used his service revolver. He reloaded it with the extra rounds of ammunition he had in his pocket in addition to the six rounds in the gun. He did not use an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine.

I recently learned of the merger of the county's welfare services, work force development and mental health services onto one agency called Human Services. I understand that the main purpose of this merger is to improve the services given to the public. I also understand that, with this merger, funds earmarked for the mentally ill would be commingled with the funds earmarked for drug and alcohol treatment and other welfare programs. With this commingling of funds, what assurance do Supervisors Susan Lacey, Kathy Long and John Flynn give to ensure that funds set aside specifically for mental health are in truth spent on mental health?

After being warned by federal officials of possible legal troubles, county supervisors on Tuesday delayed their decision on how to restructure the sprawling Human Services Agency until it can find a way to legally shift control of the mental health services department from the county hospital to welfare officials. "We had no choice," Supervisor John Flynn said. "Our decision was based on a letter from the federal government that said they wouldn't accept the arrangement we had proposed."

Kathy Wachter-Poynor, whose seven-year tenure as head of San Diego County's public mental health system was marked by controversies over patient care, long-range planning and personnel matters, will leave her post next month, county officials announced Wednesday.

Dr. Milton H. Miller, a former chairman of the psychiatry department at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and a longtime champion of mental health care for poor and minority communities, has died. He was 77. Miller died Wednesday at his home in San Pedro following a long illness, according to UCLA, where he was professor emeritus of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine.

Nearly everyone in the United States has heard of Littleton, Colo., Jonesboro, Ark., and West Paducah, Ky. These places have entered the culture's conscience only because of an increasingly common type of tragedy linking them together--school shootings. In American culture, these high-profile occurrences have become screens upon which troubled individuals project their feelings.

Gerald D. Zaslaw, 63, a leader in the child welfare field, died Oct. 7 in a boating accident near Santa Catalina. Zaslaw was president of Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services in West Los Angeles from 1987 until 2002. After retiring he lived on a sailboat docked at Marina del Rey between long sailing cruises. During Zaslaw's years at Vista Del Mar, the facility opened the state's first high-security residential psychiatric treatment center for children.

WASHINGTON - When President Obama pledged this week to strengthen the nation's mental health system to help reduce gun violence, he also implicitly acknowledged that a gap remains in his signature effort to guarantee Americans access to healthcare. Two landmark laws - including the sweeping 2010 health law - have been enacted since 2008 to improve mental health treatment. But the Obama administration is still writing rules for both measures that will change how insurers deal with millions of Americans who suffer from mental illness and addiction.

Elizabeth Guzman will never forget the day last year when she came home from work to find her 25-year-old stepson, Bobby, holding a knife. In a threatening voice, he asked her, "Where are you from?" "I broke out in a sweat," she said. "I thought, 'I'm alone in the house. If anything happens, no one will know.'" Guzman tricked him into putting the knife down by handing him two chocolate chip cookies, one for each hand. But she fears it's only a matter of time until it happens again.

especially random mass murders -- are frightening. And when we're frightened, we look for explanations that will restore some sense of safety to the world. That's one reason so many people are speculating about whether James Holmes, the suspect in Friday's horrific Colorado shootings, is mentally ill. In some ways it would be reassuring to find out that he is. Then we could begin figuring out new ways to keep ourselves safe. Some people would argue for better outreach to the mentally ill, for providing more and better mental health services or strengthening involuntary commitment laws.

One in five adults in the U.S. had a mental illness in 2010, with people ages 18 to 25 having the highest rates, according to a national survey. The report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Survey on Drug Use and Health , released Thursday, includes information from 68,487 completed surveys about mental illness (as defined by the American Psychiatric Assn.'s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual...

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center will close its in-patient and outpatient psychiatry programs over the next year, a move prompted by significant shifts in the healthcare system, hospital officials said. The decision, which was announced Wednesday, was driven by hospital finances and changes to the delivery and organization ofhealthcare services nationwide. "We are undergoing a massive transformation," said Mark Gavens, the chief operating officer. "It is natural for an organization to focus on what it does well and what it will continue to need to do well to serve the community.

President Obama awarded Presidential Citizens Medals on Thursday to three Los Angeles residents for providing mental health services to veterans, a shelter for homeless and disabled veterans and creating a music program for children in gang-plagued neighborhoods. Judith Broder of the Soldiers Project, John Keaveney of the New Directions shelter and Margaret Martin of the Harmony Project joined 10 other recipients from across the nation for an awards ceremony at the White House. Before awarding the medals, Obama spoke about how many honorees had mustered the courage to be a good Samaritan during their own time of pain and need.

San Diego County's proposed mental health cuts are plunging it into a tangle of ethical and legal issues that are part of the national movement away from institutionalized care and toward community treatment of the mentally ill. "It's like a hospital, it seems to me, turning away a cancer patient," Stephen J. Morse, a UCLA law professor who studies psychiatric legal issues, said when told of the county's planned cutbacks.

A mentally ill woman was denied access to water and a toilet and left to languish in seclusion for hours while under the care of Ventura County Mental Health Services in May, according to a report issued this week by a state licensing agency. The report is the result of an investigation conducted in November and December by employees at the local licensing and certification office of the state Department of Health Services.

Tuesday marked the passage of one year since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare reform law that still has Americans arguing: Will reform cure America's medical care woes, or make the system's maladies worse? The anniversary offered health policy experts an excuse to reflect, yet again, on the past, present and future of healthcare in the U.S. Among studies released in the last week:   A report from the Rand Corp. , published in March's American Journal of Managed Care, that showed that families with high-deductible health insurance plans spend less on healthcare -- but are also more likely to forego getting preventive care such as cancer screenings and even immunizations.  That could drive costs back up in the future, said Amelia H. Haviland, a Rand statistician and co-author of the paper, in a statement.

In the best of times and most favorable of circumstances, it's tricky business to identify whether a person who is mentally ill might become violent, so that those in his path can be protected from potential harm and he can get the treatment he needs. FOR THE RECORD: Mental health laws: In the Jan. 11 Section A, an article about identifying potentially violent mentally ill people said that California requires officials to demonstrate that a person has "grave" disability and also poses a danger to himself or others before he can be compelled to get involuntary mental health treatment.