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one another beside the tire shop, “just as friends,” for mutual protection.

CARE Court could open treatment options

People like Mark are the reason that Gov. Gavin Newsom and others are pushing so hard for the CARE Courts that would temporarily mandate treatment for those too sick to know they need help.

Thirty-four miles northeast of Vacaville, in Sacramento, we have many such severely ill people, too, of course. Elizabeth Kaino Hopper, of Carmichael, has a 33-year-old daughter who has been homeless on and off since her mental illness swamped her ability to agree to treatment. Those still capable of agreeing to treatment are the ones writing to the ACLU, she says, while “people whose illnesses are harder to treat are the voices we don’t hear.”

Since April of this year, though, her daughter has been much better, because since her arrest for assault with a deadly weapon – “trying to protect herself on the street” – she’s been living on the third floor of the Sacramento County Jail.

Three months earlier, a clinical social worker had assessed her daughter and found her “gravely disabled.” But when Sacramento County dispatched a fire truck – yes, a fire truck – and sheriff’s deputy to transport her, those officers said, “No, she knows her name, knows what day it is, has a box to live in and a dumpster to live out of – that’s food and housing” so she was not considered gravely disabled after all.

As a result, Hopper was reduced to hoping that her daughter would commit a crime that hurt no one and yet was serious enough to “win the golden ticket to get to the jail,” where she’d finally be treated, monitored and often reassessed, none of which was happening otherwise.

So yes, Hopper is a big supporter of the CARE Court idea, despite enormous pushback.

Critics argue that forcing people into treatment would be counterproductive, a horrible civil rights violation and, what’s more, under-funded. (That last objection reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke about two friends complaining about the meals at a Catskills resort. “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible,” says one, to which the other replies, “I know, and such small portions.”)

No one thinks such courts would constitute any kind of cure-all. But as Vacaville’s Nolan Sullivan says, it would at least open up “some new pathways” for helping in situations where right now, “localities are powerless” to intervene.

More treatment would have to be made available, too, it’s true. Because right now, Pasquini asks, “where do you place somebody who is blind, has a traumatic brain injury and the symptoms of schizophrenia? That’s the million-dollar question. You can’t find a bed for a person with schizophrenia, let alone all those other things.”

Sullivan says that’s because providers have no choice but to play a numbers game: “For every Mark, you’ve got 100 people in opioid addiction, so how do you triage?”

But there is at least a corner of hope that long-acting monthly injections, if Mark continues to accept them, could calm the voices that torment him enough to make other interventions possible.

Kate Grammy, the Behavioral Health Services Administrator for Solano County, says that a small homeless outreach team that’s been operating for several years is, as of April of this year, working with a mobile crisis team. It’s part of a pilot program that’s shown a lot of promise elsewhere in the state. That’s the team that gave Mark his first shot.

“I’m ecstatic with what I’m seeing,” from the new mobile crisis teams, says Catherine Moy, a city councilwoman in Fairfield, Solano’s county seat, where she ran a shelter for many years. “We piloted that program here,” starting about two years ago, “and one gentleman who had lived on the streets for years,” and became violent on a regular basis, has now been on medication for seven months, “and he no longer has that situation. It takes a long time, and it’s expensive, but I’ve seen it work, and we owe it to them.”

It’s also expensive to go on as we have been, watching people die.

Grammy acknowledges that staffing for mobile crisis teams is an issue, here and everywhere. But persistence in offering services makes a difference, which is why some people who’ve long said no to services are agreeing to work with these teams.

Even if those teams expand, laws and attitudes will have to change, too, if we’re really going to reach those hardest to treat.

The definition of “gravely disabled” should certainly be expanded to take account of anosognosia, a condition associated with schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and other medical problems, which prevents people from understanding that they need treatment.

And state Sen. Henry Stern’s important bill guaranteeing a right to treatment for unhoused and severely mentally ill Californians ought to be paired with the CARE Court bill, because what does mandated treatment mean if none is available?

Renée C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee/TNS Mark Rippee rests on the side of a bus stop after urinating outside in Vacaville, Aug. 1. “I would like to see my brother receive treatment for the no fault brain disease that he has. I would like to see him have safe housing. He just needs someone to care for him,” said his sister Linda Privatte.

After Mark got that first shot of Seroquel, his sisters were briefly ebullient. But then, only two days later, they got a bunch of calls reporting that he was walking on a freeway ramp straight into traffic.

Mary Borchers, who was driving on I-80 toward Vacaville that day, tells me, “I saw a big rig slam on his brakes” on the exit, “and then I saw Mark, and holy crap, someone’s going to fricking run into him!” She called 911, was told that several others had already reported the same thing, and that California Highway Patrol officers were on their way.

By the time she was able to circle back around to see if he was OK, he was with law enforcement who then “left him to fend for himself once again.”

The morning Linda next sees Mark, he’s still asleep on the sidewalk and for many minutes too groggy to talk. One homeless man walking by taunts him – show these ladies your Super Bowl rings why don’t you – and another asks Linda why she can’t take Mark home with her.

On this day, Mark urinates into a cup right in front of us, and never does come around enough to answer her questions about the Seroquel, which most likely won’t kick in for weeks.

He is able to explain walking onto the freeway, though: He and a friend had been out looking for an apartment, and after that friend disappeared, he somehow got turned around and walked into harm’s way: “I was trying to get us off the street!”

But then suddenly he’s channeling the voices he’s hearing, shouting, “Mark, goddamn you!” and “I turned the controls over to James Mark Rippee!” He is the voices, and how scary would that be?

As we walk away, Linda is crying a little. She always feels guilty leaving him, she says, because “it makes me feel like I’m as bad as our U.S. mental health system.”

That isn’t true, but this is: “Our family is his mental health system.’’ Until laws change, it’s the only one he’s got. at the time:

“I feel confident that you will oblige me therefore by inserting this my disclaimer in your widely circulated and well conducted paper, not because I have the smallest fear that any person possessing the first elements of optical Science (to say nothing of Common Sense) could for a moment be misled into believing such extravagancies, but because I consider the precedent a bad one that the absurdity of a story should ensure its freedom from contradiction when universally repeated in so many quarters and in such a variety of forms.”

Locke never apologized for what later became known as the Great Moon Hoax, although he admitted in an 1840 letter published in the New World newspaper that it was meant as satire.

Three years later, Locke tried to pull off another hoax in the New Era, a New York newspaper. He wrote that he had discovered a long-lost letter of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who had disappeared in West Africa in 1805. Nobody was buying his story this time, though.

Locke eventually gave up journalism and worked for the Customs Service in New York. When he died in 1871, the New York Sun reported in his obituary:

“Mr. Locke was the author of the ‘Moon Hoax,’ the most successful scientific joke ever published . . . The story was told with a minuteness of detail and dexterous use of technical phrases that not only imposed upon the ordinary reader, but deceived and puzzled men of science to an astonishing degree.”

As Klein later wrote on Twitter about his Spanish sausage prank, “Let’s learn to be wary of the arguments from positions of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images.”

DAILY REPUBLIC

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