By Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino : sfchronicle – excerpt (audio)
California is embracing psychiatric hospitals again. Behind locked doors, a profit-driven system is destroying lives…
Soon after taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to finally fix a crisis that had come to define California. Emergency rooms were overflowing with people routed by depression, drug addiction and psychosis, many with unstable housing and nowhere to go except the streets.
“This is California’s original sin,” Newsom would say, pointing to decades of government mistakes and neglect that had left the state with a severe shortage of psychiatric treatment beds and narrow restrictions on who could be forced into them. “This is the manifestation of our failure.”
For the first time in a generation, California would pour billions of dollars into mental health facilities while making it easier to lock people in some of them. Those who had long been overlooked, Newsom pledged, would receive stabilizing medication and therapy to help them return to their communities, families, schools and careers.
Yet a Chronicle investigation has found that the institutions Newsom’s administration is increasingly relying on are themselves a public health catastrophe…(more)
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