Forcing mental health treatment can’t beat community support

To the editor: As a retired skilled social employee and county behavioral well being methods director with greater than 50 years of expertise throughout 5 counties, I assist the place taken within the editorial, “Forcing remedy on mentally unwell homeless folks is a foul thought.”

All of us must recount 1963, when the Group Psychological Well being Providers Act was enacted. This federal laws offered community-based remedy and providers as an alternative choice to restrictive institutional care in hospitals.

Over the past 50 years I’ve skilled all the foremost public coverage modifications within the supply of behavioral well being providers. These efforts work provided that they obtain assist by the whole group.

We should settle for that behavioral well being points are really medical points, and that people should be handled as we do different medical issues in our society. What’s lacking is the political will in any respect ranges of presidency to make these applications efficient, and the required group acceptance that makes it a complete system of care.

Allan Rawland, Rancho Cucamonga

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To the editor: The Occasions’ editorial against compelled remedy of mentally unwell folks relies on a delusion about psychological sickness.

For many individuals with psychological sickness, a part of the diagnostic analysis consists of the particular person’s means to acknowledge that they’re sick. Many individuals in disaster fail to acknowledge that they’re affected by a psychological abnormality.

With out compelled intervention, this lack of ability to acknowledge a necessity for remedy will stop remedy regardless of how nicely funded or staffed.

The voluntary mannequin fails when confronted with a illness that precludes acceptance of the truth that somebody is definitely sick.

Norman Rodewald, Moorpark