One of the most crucial aspects of CARE Court that is getting lost in translation is that people like Rippee-Hanson and Privatte could finally have a powerful tool to stabilize their ill loved ones, before they become homeless or crumble into sickness and death.ĬARE Court could compel counties to provide services and treatment to people such as Rippee, finally. And that is what CARE Court will do.Īlthough the law allows medical providers, police and others to file a CARE Court petition, it more importantly allows family members to do so. They should have had some sort of right, limited by great oversight, to help this beloved sibling. And his sisters, who spent nearly every day of their adult lives caring for him as best they could, lost decades trying to explain the pain and horror of that alternate reality for all of them as he deteriorated into a “mangled, broken man,” as Privatte, Rippee-Hanson’s twin, described him. Mark Rippee was trapped by a cruel disease that made decisions for him. It also didn’t matter that he was hit by cars twice, or that he often slept in front of the county building, forcing those charged with helping him to walk by him on a regular basis and watch him suffer outside of their office windows. It did not matter that he had lost both his eyes and part of his frontal lobe in a motorcycle accident that sent him hurtling into a grain harvester when he was 24. For a time, he believed that the police were growing new recruits inside of him - spawning other humans with his body as an incubator - and it was the whispers of those creatures that rattled in his head. It did not matter to civil libertarians or the powers that be that Rippee heard voices and had delusions that left him trapped in his own reality. Still, few among us want to see people institutionalized, or deprived of their right to autonomy.īut as Rippee-Hanson puts it, “What about the right to live? What about the right to get treatment for a disease that is no fault of your own?” We are all heartsick with the endless suffering on our streets, angry and frustrated with a problem that seems to be growing exponentially worse despite countless political promises to fix it. If that were how CARE Court turned out, it would be unconscionable. In their filing, the three organizations petitioning to stop CARE Court, Disability Rights California, Western Center on Law and Poverty, and the Public Interest Law Project, argue that “thousands of unhoused Californians with mental illness will be threatened with court orders, forced into involuntary treatment and swept off the streets, not because they are a danger to themselves or others, but because a judge has speculated they are ‘likely’ to become so in the future.” That framing has led to justifiable fears that the new courts will be used to unfairly pick up, and maybe even lock up, homeless people deemed troublesome or disruptive, people with substance use disorders or less serious mental illness. “If Mark wasn’t gravely disabled then no one in California is.”ĬARE Court has largely been billed as a plan to address homelessness, and that’s probably the governor’s biggest misstep in what is otherwise a good and necessary idea.
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It feels like it’s the family members trying to open the eyes of people who think they have some higher, righteous goal to protect the rights of someone who can’t choose,” Rippee-Hanson said.
It is considered a violation of civil rights. More families like his will be left shamed and blamed for trying to help.īecause in California, if someone like Rippee doesn’t want mental health care, even if they are in deep psychosis, it is nearly impossible for family members to do anything. More people like Rippee will die on our streets. If the Supreme Court accepts the case, or even sends it back to be litigated in lower courts, it could put on hold indefinitely California’s only real plan for helping our most vulnerable and seriously mentally ill. Gavin Newsom’s plan to address the logjam of aid for those with serious brain disease. Last week, as my colleague Hannah Wiley wrote, a trio of disability rights and civil liberties groups filed a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court to stop Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Courts (CARE Courts), Gov. That brawl over what moral and legal justice looks like for our most severely mentally ill is headed - once again - into California’s court system, where many efforts to reform our laws have been quashed in recent decades.
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