Los Angeles Postpones Implementation of Outpatient Committal

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Los Angeles County has decided to postpone implementation of its outpatient forced treatment law (“Laura’s Law”) in order to try to resolve the legal and civil rights concerns that have been raised, according to representatives of Disability Rights California writing in an op-ed published October 12 in the Sacramento Bee. Last month, Mad In America reported that DRC planned to challenge the outpatient committal legislation in court, and the Bee published an article in support of Laura’s Law on October 5, citing the MIA story and criticizing DRC.

“In the mid-1970s, Congress funded legal-aid groups such as Disability Rights California to defend the civil rights of mentally ill people who were held in inhumane conditions in asylums,” wrote Dan Morain in the Bee. He linked to the Mad In America story about DRC’s plan to challenge Laura’s Law, then quoted Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., saying that, “Their initial mission of stopping maltreatment has morphed into stopping treatment, and that is wrong.” Morain wrote that Murphy’s bill HR 3717 would change these “antiquated” laws and “pare back the $35 million that the federal government spends on legal-aid groups such as Disability Rights.”

“Some people on the left and right say assisted outpatient treatment strips people of their rights,” Morain concluded. “To the contrary, they have the right to treatment.”

In a response op-ed, Disability Rights California’s Leslie Napper and Leslie Morrison wrote that “studies show that assisted-outpatient treatment will not guarantee those with mental illness receive the services they need. Rather, we want to ensure that counties offer a full range of voluntary mental health services, as required by law, before implementing assisted-outpatient treatment.”

After DRC told the county of their plan to sue, as reported in MIA, Napper and Morrison indicated that the county decided to delay implementing Laura’s Law. “We are pleased that Los Angeles County has decided to delay implementation of assisted-outpatient treatment. We plan to work with the county to resolve our concerns and are not pursuing litigation.”

Dan Morain: Mentally ill deserve more of our attention (Sacramento Bee, October 5, 2014)

Another View: Assisted-outpatient treatment not always effective for mentally ill (Sacramento Bee, October 12, 2014)

DRC Will Challenge California’s Outpatient Committal Laws in Court (Mad In America, September 7, 2014)

11 COMMENTS

  1. Good news…but this needs to go further. No one should be required to take any drug as part of their “treatment.” And certainly no one should be required to take a drug that causes long term physical disability in the form of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, neurological deficits and worsening potential for psychosis (as noted in longitudinal studies). Period.

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  2. Why must this be framed in termas of “effective treatment” and not the horrendous, documentable damage that is done in the name of “treatment”? Until the medical model is exposed for the sham it is people will read stuff like this and say, “Well, we have to make sure people get the treatment they need.”

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    • Oldhead,

      Society is more likely to believe the big lies, because the majority of decent folks wouldn’t dream anyone (especially an entire industry of so called trustworthy doctors) would be so deplorable as to propagandize such enormous untruths.

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      • …..Society is more likely to believe the big lies

        “The masses indulge in petty falsehoods every day, but it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths and they are not able to believe in the possibility of such monsterous effrontery … The bigger the lie, therefore, the more likely it is to be believed … Besides, even the most insolent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.”

        – Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”

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        • Look, the truth is that the mentally disturbed are a cash crop in western societies and across the globe. This is all about money. The love of money is the root of all evil. All the evil that we as psychiatrist survivors experience is due to the billions of dollars that certain people in our communities derived from our suffering. They got what they love while tormenting us. This is an endemic evil in society fuelled by the senseless greed promoted by Wall Street. Certain individuals saw us as easy targets because we had weak minds at the time of detention. This is exactly the same thing that happened in World War 2 era Germany. The leaders in that society thought they could eliminate the weakest from society and make a huge profit from it, at the same time. The question you as the reader have to ask is, what individuals in our societies are sharing in the profits derived from the suffering of the mentally disturbed?
          The thugs doing their dirty work are counterfeit doctor’s called psychiatrists. These are not Doctors as their specialisation is not a science. Psychiatry is based on subjective opinion rather than fact. They caused us suffering in return for power, prestige, status and career.

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