By Sophia Bollag : sfchronicle – excerpt
As other counties across California plan to delay adoption of a new law that expands involuntary commitment of people with severe mental illness, San Francisco is charging ahead.
The new state law expands the group of people who can be placed into involuntary medical treatment to include people whose mental illness or drug addiction inhibits their ability to keep themselves safe. The law does not change the court process people must go through before they are compelled into treatment, which involves hearings and opportunities for people to argue before a judge that they do not need to be detained or placed in a conservatorship.
Mayor London Breed directed San Francisco departments to start preparing for the new law the day after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it. She told the Chronicle her administration plans to begin filing paperwork to put more people into conservatorships or involuntary psychiatric holds as soon as it takes effect next year.
The new law, SB43 by Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, was sponsored by psychiatric organizations and other health care professionals who said it would get a small but troubled group of people off the streets and into treatment…(more)