Darrell Steinberg and the Campaign for Mental Health

San Francisco Mayor Endorses Initiative

Today, Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, Mark Leno, Assembly Member from San Francisco, and I held a press conference at City Hall to launch the Campaign for Mental Health in the San Francisco area. Gavin Newsom became the first mayor to endorse the initiative.

We have lots of other elected officials and organizational endorsers.

Click here to view the endorsement list >>

Please take this opportunity to spread the word about the initiative to your family and friends. Use our tell a friend page to send our web address. Make sure you urge them to sign up for email updates.

On our homepage your friends can learn about Mayor Newsom's endorsement and read Stacy Tate's powerful testimonial.

Click here to go to our Tell a Friend page >>

Thanks for all of your effort!

What services will be provided to children under the initiative

In an earlier post, I wrote about how difficult it is to read the initiative and figure out what it does, because it is designed to fit into existing code. I described the gaps in services that exist under the present system, without the benefit of the initiative, and today I’d like to write about how the initiative will fill those gaps.

Mental Illness and Families

Lisa, it was very courageous of you to be one of the first to be so upfront about sharing your story. And, yes, you do look like a regular family. I had been planning to write about an article I read in the NAMI Sacramento newsletter, and your story jogged my memory about that.

Click here to read Lisa's story >>

A front-page story, “Helping Kids Live with Mentally Ill Parents,” in the NAMI Sacramento April 2004 newsletter deals with some of the issues you raise. That article says that children with a mentally ill parent face challenges to which most of their peers will never be able to relate. “They have a 40% chance of experience major depression by age 20 and a 60% chance by 25. Also, 61% of the children with parents who have a major depressive disorder are likely to develop a psychiatric disorder before adulthood.”

The article is helpful in a very specific and educational way. It states that:

“When mental illness runs in the family, it is likely to cause lack of communication, organization and proper functioning, fewer clearly defined goals, and little or no guidance to children for performing even the most routine tasks, according to Ronald Seifer, Ph.D. and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. ‘It’s those everyday activities that families have to engage in to make sure that their lives go smoothly. That kind of stuff doesn’t seem to work as well when there are mental health problems in the family.’ Dr. Seifer says.”

And, surprisingly, offering help to children of parents with mental illness is not always that complicated. “A study by William Beardslee at the judge Baker Children’s center in Boston found that a brief, group therapy prevention program can reduce the risk of depression in the adolescent children of parents with a history of depression.”

Lisa, group therapy prevention programs for children of parents with a history of depression, or other mental illness, is the type of innovative program that the initiative can fund. Thank you so very much for sharing your story and helping raise awareness.

AB 34 Story Says it All

Please take a minute to read Stacy Tate's story on our website. Her testimonial on what AB 34 has meant for her life is a powerful reminder of why we all need to work hard to pass this initiative.

Click here to read Stacy's story >>

Schizophrenia Machine available to the public tomorrow between 9:00AM and 11:00AM in Sacramento at 925 L street. To read more about this in past posts click here.

Public events

On Friday, April 30, at 10:30 a.m., Gavin Newsom and I will be on the the steps of City Hall in San Francisco to talk to the public and to the press about the initiative. I hope to see you there!

Also this coming week, the Mental Health Association is sponsoring an event to raise public awareness about schizophrenia. I've discussed this event in an early post .

The association will have an virtual reality machine that allows people to experience what it feels like to have schizophrenia. Of course, a virtual reality machine cannot possibly show the range of this mental illness, or what it feels like to have it all the time, but it can give members of the public an experience that many people with schizophrenia say is an accurate approximation of some of what they experience.

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that, on average, people with schizophrenia suffer with the illness for five years before it is diagnosed and treated. Our society should not allow one out of 100 of its members to suffer a severe and disabling, but treatable, physical illness for five years without treatment.

We allow people to suffer from schizophrenia without diagnosis because we don't know they have it, and we don't know what it's like to have it. This week, we'll get an idea. I hope that you can all stop by the Capitol, or 925 L Street, to participate in this virtual reality experience. The machine will be available on three separate days for public use, and I'll post those dates and times and locations on Monday.

More on Voter Education Day and Children’s Mental Health Funding

We know that children in our state have unmet mental health needs and a specific goal of the initiative is to help children.

The initiative is drafted so that it will fit right into existing Welfare and Institutions Code provisions regarding mental health, so it’s difficult to just read it and figure out what it will do for children. One must be familiar with the entire code relating to mental health to be able to read the initiative and figure out what it does and how it works. I’ll explain.

The Welfare and Institutions Code establishes a system of community mental health services, including an adults’ and a children’s system of care, for mental health services. These systems of care are funded by the Local Revenue Fund, which is money from sales tax and vehicle license fee revenues that goes to counties. Counties that receive money from the Local Revenue Fund for the purpose of providing mental health services are required to provide these services to children ONLY to the extent that funds are available.

Unfortunately, adequate funds are not available to serve all of the people who need mental health services. Therefore, under our present system, children receiving full-scope Medi-Cal are eligible to receive all mental health services that are medically necessary. Children who have insurance are eligible to receive mental health services under their plans. But children who are uninsured or underinsured and who do not qualify for Medi-Cal do not get services unless their parents can pay out of pocket.

For those children, however, services are available, at no cost to their parents, farther down the line. Those children qualify to receive mental health services under different funding streams if they enter the foster care system, enter the juvenile justice system, or are diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed and receive services from the county through their schools under the AB 3632 program.

This is where the initiative comes in. The initiative will provide a dedicated funding stream to supplement the children’s system of care that is now so inadequately funded, making mental health services available to children who need them, regardless of whether these children have adequate insurance to pay for those services or qualify for Medi-Cal.

And, more importantly, the initiative will fund services for these children well BEFORE they qualify for services through the foster care system, the juvenile justice system, or the school system. The initiative will close the gaps.

Click on the text of the initiative, and take a look at Section 5892 toward the end. It states that about 50% of the money raised by the initiative (approximately $600 million a year) will be divided between the adults’ and children's systems of care. Children's programs will be receiving a lot of money under this initiative and that was one of our purposes in writing this initiative.

We want to ensure that prevention and early intervention services are available to children to treat mental illnesses early, and to prevent those mental illnesses from becoming severe and disabling and requiring, or leading to, out-of-home treatment.

Mark Your Calendars

I wanted to give you a little more information about the purpose of Mental Health Advocacy Day at the Capitol on May 27, and about why I hope you will be there.

The purpose of this event is to raise public awareness about mental illness. Did you know that people who have schizophrenia, and we're talking about one percent of the population and millions of people in California, typically suffer for six years before they get treatment?

In almost every case, people with this mental illness are on the street, in a hospital, or in jail before they get help. For those who land in jail, the mental health slots are very often full when they are released.

Yet, this is a very treatable condition. If people get help within the first weeks or months of onset of this mental illness, they do not need more than what private insurance will cover. If they do not get treatment early on, they will usually lose their jobs and often their homes and close relationships. That is just unacceptable.

This mental illness, in almost all cases, happens between the ages 10 and 30. For men the onset is typically in the late teens or early 20's. For women, the onset is typically in their late 20's.

The purpose of Mental Health Advocacy Day is to raise awareness so that the millions of people in California who have this mental illness, or another mental illnesses, do not suffer unnecessarily.

We want to raise awareness so that people recognize the symptoms of mental illnesses before they become severe and disabling. And we want everyone who has a vote - in the Legislature or at the polls - to understand the importance of this issue.

Please join me at the Capitol for this important Advocacy Day. We need to raise awareness about mental illness and about the fact that we can prevent unnecessary suffering. And we need to help everyone understand how important it is that we establish a dedicated funding source to treat mental illness.

Finally, a big, successful Advocacy Day will help us build support and momentum to pass the initiative in November.

So please mark your calendars and plan to be in Sacramento on May 27!

Click here to sign up or get more information >>

Stay tuned

It's been a busy month around the Capitol, and the budget process is fully underway. I don't have much time today, but just wanted to check in and to encourage you to tell a couple friends about the campaign and our web site.

In the upcoming weeks, I'll be writing more about exactly what the initiative will do. It wasn't possible for us to draft it to tell the story, so to speak, because we had to incorporate it into existing code. Maybe I'll just start at the beginning, with the idea, and bring everyone up to date.

Being involved in this initiative campaign really has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Stay tuned!

Voter Education Day

May 5 will be our first Voter Education Day for the Campaign for Mental Health, and the focus will be children's mental health issues.

As I've said before in this blog, the United States Surgeon General found that one out of 10 of our children has a mental disorder severe enough to cause some level of impairment, yet only one in five of those children gets treatment.

I believe that every child in the state should have the opportunity to reach his or her full potential, and we know that a child who is disabled by a mental disorder is not in a position to do that. A child suffering from a mental disorder who is not getting treatment typically has difficulty learning, and difficulty making and keeping friends, - both very important for a child's well being.

The first step toward helping children is education. I encourage you to read about children's mental health issues, and the U.S. Surgeon General's report is a good place to begin. Click here to view the report >>

The value of community

I’ve been an elected official at the state level since 1998, and in that time, I have come to appreciate the value of community. Over the past four or five decades, our society has become an individualistic one in many ways, but it’s become clear to me that we need to become a community again, and particularly in the area of mental health, where many people affected by mental illness have been isolated for too long. We need to find ways to be part of a community.

The AB 34 programs establish a community of support for people with severe mental illness who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and those programs have worked very well. The initiative will expand that community even further, to include prevention and early intervention services for adults and children, and will also greatly expand the array of services available to adults and children under existing programs.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) has formed a community on even a broader scale. NAMI is an organization that has been successful in establishing communities, throughout the US and California, of people with mental illness and their families and friends. In my area, the NAMI chapter offers monthly potlucks for members and guests, and also public education courses, called “Keys to Understanding,” about mental illness. NAMI offers a place for people with mental illness, their families, and their friends to go and find support and friends—a community. People can go to these meetings and find sources of help for themselves and for their loved ones.

After the initiative is adopted by the voters in November, we hope to work with NAMI California and make their job even easier by substantially increasing the availability and types of services for people with mental illness, people at risk of having mental illness, and their families.

The NAMI California community went to work for us when we were in the signature-gathering phase of this initiative process and gathered 10,000 signatures. Most ballot initiatives have about 10,000 volunteer signatures in total. NAMI translated its community into advocacy and gathered 10,000 signatures on its own.

NAMI California is mobilizing to help with outreach and fundraising for the campaign and has set an ambitious goal of raising $250,000 for the campaign in the coming months. Thank you, NAMI, for your continued support.

If you have an interest in learning more about mental health issues, or in finding a mental health community to join, please contact the NAMI chapter in your area.