SF's mental health program is failing

Chronically disturbed individuals are still cycled back to the streets

If you didn’t get a chance to read Heather Knight’s terrific column on Sunday you can find it here. In it she does something I really like.

And there’s something I wish she’d done.

For starters, the story and the writing are excellent. It is an absolutely harrowing local family tale of seven years of harassment and violence from a severely mentally ill man.

Finally, after many 911 calls and police interventions, it finally happened — the destructive act everyone expected. The man set a fire to their multi-unit building. Thankfully everyone got out, but five households are displaced.

I texted Nicolas King, an old City Hall friend and Knight’s primary source, and he said they could be without a home for 12-18 months.

It seems outrageous. Why did King, his wife and others have to watch this slow-motion train wreck coming at them when everyone knew how the movie ends? And it could have been worse. Luckily the guy didn’t have a gun.

And why, after the Board of Supervisors approved it almost three years ago, has Sen. Scott Wiener’s landmark Bill 1045 continued to have little effect? The bill authorized cities to put the chronically, helplessly mentally ill individuals in conservatorship, compelling them to take treatment.

I thought Knight’s column was a perfect chance to mention that according to the Examiner, as of last month just one person has been put in conservatorship.

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Of course, the incident in the column could just be one random moment in an otherwise orderly program for the mentally ill — says the guy who just last week walked past a guy with his pants around his ankles.

I think it happens all the time. In fact, a member of our family had a very similar experience.

The couple moved into a nice place in an established neighborhood. All was well until a new tenant moved in upstairs. It was quickly clear something was terribly wrong.

It began with loud music, but progressed to all-night sessions with screaming and things breaking. The police were called more than once.

It culminated when the two walked out their door to find a SWAT team with rifles, watching the upstairs unit. An officer suggested they should clear the area.

The cops got him out, but there were thousands of dollars of damages and the landlord had to put the other tenants up in a rental until repairs were made. Again, lucky the guy didn’t have a gun.

Now, there’s no doubt about it. Conservatorships make people uneasy. Honestly, they make me uneasy.

When Wiener got his bill before the Judiciary Committee it ran into a barrage of objections from civil rights attorneys on the committee. They pecked away at the bill, raising the standard for a conservatorship.

The original plan was to say someone was eligible if they’d had four “5150’s” in 12 months. That’s a booking by the police for being “a danger to themselves or others.” The committee changed that to eight times.

That’s a high bar, but there are people in the city who are reaching it. They are that disturbed.

Mostly the arguments against compelling treatment and possibly confining the patient, center on “violation of civil rights.” They then drift into a vague area where counseling and better communication are good substitutes.

Still, at first I didn’t have a good answer when someone said, “So you are saying it is OK to tell someone that they must live in a treatment center against their will?” It did sound draconian.

Until I met the parents.

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In writing about this years ago, some parents reached out to me to tell their side of the story. Simply put, in some of them were scared to death.

Back in 2012, Rozelle Trizuto told me she always took her glasses off when meeting her daughter. That’s because she never knew when her daughter, a diagnosed schizophrenic, would unexpectedly punch her in the face. She got tired of replacing glasses.

“Please help my daughter,” she said back then. “She’s dangerous to herself and others, obviously. At what point do people see that she’s gravely disabled and needs to be in a locked unit?”

Or Dale Milfay, who immediately called 911 when her then-32-year-old son said, “I want to talk about my feelings.” Dale and her husband knew those words were a warning a psychotic episode was about to begin.

The son threw her down and kicked her husband in the chest. It was one of several violent, uncontrollable incidents.

“My son won’t take his medications. He gets homicidal,” she said. “Where does someone like my kid go? To be honest he got better treatment in jail.”

So what’s happened? I guess there have been some small steps forward. Wiener’s bill was watered down, but it passed. The city may have only gotten one conservatorship in the first two years, but officials say there are more in the pipeline.

And if there was ever a time to implement this, it is now. As we are coming out of a pandemic, with the city opening up, there is a sense of renewal in the city. What better time to give those 50-100 individuals who are chronically ill a safe and healthy future?

That’s the hope.

Here’s the reality. The disturbed tenant was back at our family member’s place last week, even though he doesn’t live there any more. He stormed up and down the street, yelling and screaming. The couple felt threatened enough to leave the area.

The police arrived later.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Compliments and suggestions welcomed, criticism not so much. Twitter: @cwnevius