Video: mental health law symposium

Mental Health Law Symposium
"Protecting and Treating those Destabilized by Mental Illness:
Beyond the Asylum and the Jail"
Berkeley and Los Angeles, May 27, 2008

Unedited footage now available as webcast material for viewing:

Morning sessions

Afternoon Sessions
(requires (free) RealPlayer from www.Real.com, or equivalent)

From the Program description:

Forty years ago, in 1967, the California legislature enacted the sweeping Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) law designed to revolutionize the objectives, means, and procedures through which the state (and private actors using its authority) can intervene to treat those destabilized by serious mental illness. The law, which bears the names of its leading legislative sponsors, came into effect in 1969 and largely became the template on which most other states transformed their approach. Its most visible achievement would be the massive shrinkage of state hospitalization of people with mental illness, but the changes it inspired in the criminal and civil governance of those with severe mental illness extended far beyond deinstitutionalization.

In the spring of 2008, four decades after that pivotal moment, we will gather a group of legal and clinical experts, some academics, some in practice, most who have devoted considerable effort to studying or reforming practice in California..

.. strikingly broad consensus that those destabilized by severe mental illness too often find themselves in the worst possible legal and medical situation, subject to coercive state power in the form either of jail or prison sentences with none of the normative obligation to treat or the clinical expertise to assess that the old custodial system provided.

..The shrinkage of the population committed to public hospitals was anticipated, but the dramatic increase in those destabilized by mental illness among the chronically homeless and in jails and prisons was an unanticipated result of the reform.

Virtually nobody anticipated in 1969 that most of the innovative efforts to integrate clinical and legal expertise under flexible and individualized judicial authority would take place inside the criminal justice process.... ...It also often barred family members of those suffering from mentally ill from the process and at times has served as a barrier to treatment for the mentally ill...