State lawmakers eye forced treatment...

themselves or others or are at risk of serious physical harm because they cannot provide for their basic personal needs due to a mental illness.

Oregon, like California, does not include substance use disorders as grounds for commitment.

But its law is slightly broader than California’s, at least in one respect: Legislators amended it in 2015 to give doctors more leeway to step in if a person’s psychosis or other chronic mental illness is putting them at risk of a medical crisis.

Terry Schroeder, a civil commitment coordinator with the Oregon Health Authority, said that, before the change, a person would have to be nearly comatose or within a few days of death to meet the criteria for doctors to forcibly treat them for their own welfare.

The law now allows care providers to intervene earlier in an ongoing medical crisis.

In Oregon and California, the lack of adequate treatment options is frequently invoked in the ongoing debates over forced commitment and conservatorship.