by Zain Khalid
October 10th marked the first anniversary of California’s Senate Bill 43 (SB 43), a major revision of the landmark Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, a de-institutionalization era law designed to “end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of persons with mental health disorders.” The law loosened eligibility standards for civil commitment by expanding the existing “grave disability” criterion, making it easier to detain and hospitalize persons with mental illness against their will.
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, enacted a similar initiative in November 2022, the same year 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go, was tragically killed after being shoved onto the subway by an unhoused man with a long history of mental illness and patchy treatment. New York’s plan authorized emergency medical workers and police officers to involuntarily remove people with severe mental illness from the streets to be evaluated for hospitalization. Mayor Adams framed his plan in terms of the city’s “moral obligation” to help mentally ill citizens and California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke of a “life-and-death urgency” in advocating for SB 43.
These controversial initiatives are among the highest profile of a growing national trend toward expanding civil commitment laws: Ohio, DC, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida have introduced similar legislation in just the past year. Across the U.S., this turn toward civil commitment is driven by a triple whammy of unmitigated housing crises, an increasingly visible unhoused mentally ill population, and rising violent crime. But is civil commitment a defensible strategy in tackling this Gordian knot of intersecting social crises? Or does it merely serve to keep unseemly realities away from the public eye? To understand the role of civil commitment in addressing these challenges, we must begin by looking at how we got here. Read More
