Darrell Steinberg and the Campaign for Mental Health

Mental Health Advocacy Day

On May 27, there will be a large Mental Health Advocacy Day event on the Capitol grounds. I invite you all to be there. In fact, we hope to make this the largest mental health advocacy event in history because, as you know, I love history. Click to view the calendar >>

I also love large crowds of people who support mental health issues, and I will be speaking at the event at noon. It's a busy week in the Capitol, and I'll be in Session, but I'll make a point of taking a break from whatever I am doing in order to be at this event to speak about my involvement in mental health issues and about the initiative.

Because it's going to be a busy week at the Capitol, nearly every Member of the Assembly and Senate will be in the Building, and the Capitol Press Corps will be there, too. Your presence at this event will make a strong statement that people in this state care very much about mental health issues. Please be there if you can.

Diana Griego Irwin

If you haven't already seen Diana Griego's columns in the Sacramento Bee regarding a young woman with mental illness, I encourage your to read them. Click here to go to her column now >>

Diana is an award-winning journalist who has, through her writing, done an outstanding job of raising public awareness about issues relating to mental illness. When Diana wrote a column about the initiative when we were in the signature-gathering phase, our campaign office was deluged with phone calls and requests for copies of the petition. Our supply of petitions was depleted within two days after her column hit the newspaper and, shortly thereafter, we had enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

I'm not sure how Diana heard about the iniative campaign, but I'm glad she did, and I'm grateful to her for her columns that raise awareness about mental health issues.

Someone Has To Care

Thank you all for sharing your stories.

And, Ms. Payne, I agree with you that someone has to care. I had some constituents in my office today who are community health care providers. These people provide health care, including mental health care, to people who are Medi-Cal beneficiaries and people who are uninsured and cannot afford medical care.

Many of their patients have nowhere else to go for medical care, other than emergency rooms. Approximately 90 percent of their patients are Medi-Cal beneficiaries. These are nonprofit providers that are providing an array of medical and mental health services to an underserved and vulnerable population, yet they are facing possible cuts in their Medi-Cal reimbursement rate in this budget cycle.

The physician member of the group that visited my office today said that mental health will be the health care issue of the next two decades. He said that because we have been so effective in immunizing children, our children and adolescents in this state have become physically healthy in general. But their mental health is suffering, and their rate of substance abuse disorders is increasing.

Under the initiative, community health care providers who provide psychiatric services to vulnerable and underserved populations will be eligible to apply for funding to serve people who need this care.

We on this campaign team care very much about people who need mental health care, and we are addressing this area of need in the most effective way that we can in today's very difficult economic times.

Grassroots

Short post today.

If you haven't already signed up to receive our weekly email updates, please take a moment to do that now. Click here to sign up >>

This is primarily a grassroots campaign, and we are relying heavily on word-of-mouth to get the word out about the initiative. When you receive a weekly email that looks like it might be of interest to a friend or relative, simply forwarding that email is a way of volunteering your efforts to get the word out. Every bit of effort counts.

Our email subscribers will, we hope, be the largest mental health grassroots constituency that we have ever had in this state, and it will be a big part of this campaign. We need your help make it a success.

Children and Prevention

One concern I sometimes hear about the initiative is that it’s about the “forced medication of children.” Actually, the initiative is about providing the funding to change California’s mental health system from a “fail-first” system, to one of prevention and early intervention.

We don’t want to see children fail before they get the help they need. We want to see that services are available so that children can get the help they need with any problems they have before these problems become layered and complex and difficult to diagnose and treat, and before these children find other ways of providing relief from their problems.

It is our expectation that the availability of prevention and early intervention services to identify and address children’s actual needs, rather than expecting them to cope on their own, will actually result in less medication for children—now and in the future.

We now have 55 AB 34 programs throughout the state that treat 5,000 people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness, and severely mentally ill. We know very well that many of the consumers in the AB 34 programs are people whose mental disorders were not identified or treated early on, but could have been.

I am inspired by the improvement of these people once they get into the program, but it’s difficult to hear about the needless suffering that many of them have had to endure in their lifetimes, struggling on their own without help, and finally becoming homeless and severely mentally ill. And it’s sad to know that there are another 50,000 people who are homeless and mentally ill who are not getting treatment.

As I’ve said before, we can’t prevent certain mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but we can prevent them from becoming severe and disabling. And certain other mental illness, we can often prevent—such as anxiety and depression.

I once heard about a talk by the director of the Haight-Ashbury Clinic in San Francisco. This man, a psychiatrist, sees many of the people who didn’t get the help they needed as children, and they just couldn’t cope on their own. He has devoted his career to treating people who are addicted to drugs and who have hit bottom because of their addictions. He said that he usually can identify a person’s mental disorder by taking a look at the person’s drug of choice, meaning the drug to which the person is addicted. People addicted to barbiturates often have anxiety disorders. People addicted to amphetamines often have attention disorders. These people have found their own way of providing the relief that they need, and the professionals call that “self-medicating.”

There are many children in this state that we can help through this initiative by providing funding for services for children who need them before these children are ill enough to qualify for services under a “fail first” system. That is our goal. We know that looking away doesn’t work.

AB 2019

Between now and the election there is a lot that we need to do to build support to win the initiative. But It's difficult to follow the progress of an initiative, because once it's certified for the ballot, the main, decisive event is the General Election in November, when the voters cast their votes.

The legislative process is different. It's easy to follow a bill's progress through the legislative process. I am carrying AB 2019, which you might be interested in following. This bill relates to minors in the juvenile delinquency system who have mental illness, developmental disabilities, or substance abuse disorders, or some combination. The purpose of the bill is to ensure that these minors get the treatment they need during all phases of the process, from detention through placement.

You can find AB 2019 at www.leginfo.ca.gov. As you can see when you get to the link, you can check the bill's history, status, latest form, and committee analyses. You can track the bill through the process. You'll see when hearings on the bill are scheduled, and those hearings are open to the public.

AB 2019 is one of the few bills pending in the Legislature this session that relates to mental health. It's a difficult year in the Legislature in terms of getting bills passed because of the financial crisis this state is facing, but this is a bill that will make a difference for minors, and may be the first referral for treatment for many of them.

Speaking at Upcoming Conferences

I have just a short post today. I'm planning to hit the road as often as I can in support of the initiative, and I want to speak at as many mental health events and conferences as I can, throughout the state, from now until the election.

Stephanie Welch, one of our campaign team members, is putting together a master calendar of all large mental health events and conferences in California from now until November, and she needs your help.

If you work for an organization that is planning an event or conference, or if you know of an upcoming event or conference, please email information to Stephanie at [email protected].

Neverstreaming

As many of you know, many children have coexisting learning disorders and mental disorders, such as dyslexia and anxiety or depression. Each of these children's situation is unique. Over the years, however, I have seen some common threads.

I've spoken with many parents whose experience with their children was that the children had undiagnosed and untreated learning disorders that caused anxiety for the children, which led to depression, and so on. Basically, as the demands of school increase, and the children cannot keep up, they begin to suffer psychologically as well.

Federal law imposes on school districts a "child find" obligation, meaning that the district is required by federal law to identify children who have learning disorders and to provide services to those children. Many children with learning disorders are not "found" until at least the third grade, or later. One reason for the belated diagnoses is that many school districts interpret federal law to require that a child be two years behind academically before the child may be diagnosed as have a sufficient discrepancy between IQ and achievement in order to qualify for services. By the time the child's IQ/achievement discrepancy becomes apparent, the child is often suffering from a secondary mental disorder as well, and it becomes more difficult to diagnose the problem.

Elk Grove Unified School District, which is in my Assembly District, has obtained a waiver from the state to provide services to children before they fall two years behind. This program is called "Neverstreaming". The program has been extremely successful in identifying learning difficulties in children early, and in helping those children to learn to learn in the way that works best for them, and to develop compensating techniques to overcome areas of weakness.

Many children in Elk Grove Unified who would, without this program, end up in special education are able to avoid that outcome entirely--and they are also able to avoid developing the secondary mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, that so often affect children with undiagnosed and untreated learning disorders.

I commend Elk Grove Unified for its efforts in this program. This is the type of thing we are hoping to accomplish with the initiative--early diagnosis and treatment to prevent mental disorders from becoming severe and disabling.

Please share your story if you are an adult who experienced these issues as a child, and how these issues affected your life. I hope that we can spread the word in order to help others.

Using the Internet to Build a Network of Core Supporters

No doubt many of you have been following a relatively new development in the campaign world - using the internet to build a powerful grassroots network of supporters. MoveOn.org and Howard Dean's campaign blazed the trail and now both Presidential candidates are busy using the internet to build their campaigns.

We know that the internet can be a powerful tool for building support for our initiative. And we've got a great opportunity in the coming months to build our list of core supporters - people who are close to mental health issues and their friends and loved ones - before the broader electorate starts paying attention to the election beyond the Presidential race.

To help accomplish this we've just launched a new area on our website. It's called Team Headquarters. Using the tools at Team Headquarters you can build your own online network of family, friends and professional colleagues.

Teams will participate in monthly Voter Education Days, add people to their Teams to increase our reach, and raise money for the campaign.

Team Members will have their own personal campaign web page for friends and family to visit.

I hope each of you will start your own Team or join with others to form a Team to help us win this historic measure in November.

Click here to get started or to learn more >>

A Little History

In 1968 the Legislature enacted laws (SB 677) to empty the state hospitals, to assume 90 percent of the funding for community programs, and to obligate all counties to participate in those programs that had been optional since 1957.

You all know by now that I'm a history buff, and that I like old documents. I found the analysis on SB 677 that was prepared for Governor Reagan in 1967 before he signed SB 677 into law, and here was one of the promises: The legislative history of that bill states that this 90/10 cost-sharing basis would apply

"for all services in the community programs and patients in the hospitals for the mentally ill."

At that time Legislators agreed that the money would "follow the patients" and that the state would provide the counties with sufficient funds to provide the necessary community services.

However, in 1973 the state capped the funding, thereafter providing only cost-of-living increases, and since that time the program has been funded at about two percent of the state general fund, as compared to four percent that was spent during the 1960s. Thus, in reality, only half of the promised money followed the patients into community care.

Almost two decades later, in 1991, the state again changed the law to require participating counties to provide services only to the extent that resources are available. The promise made upon emptying the state hospitals, as outlined above, was for the state to pay for 90 percent "all services in the community programs".

Please help us make good on the promise to fund community mental health services. There will be many opportunities to get involved as we move closer to the election. I hope you'll sign up to work with us.

Click here to sign up for email updates if you have not already.

Click here to sign up to become an Online Volunteer.

Click here to join me as a Mental Health Hero with a monthly donation to the campaign. We really need your financial support so please consider signing up as a Hero or making a one time donation.

Thanks for all your hard work!