No doubt there will be several official reviews into this week’s shooting death of mental health patient Linda Carol Clark. Administrators at Placerville’s Marshall Hospital will be asked why they don’t have a locked psychiatric unit at their facility or why Clark wasn’t adequately monitored or restrained.<\/p>\n
The El Dorado Fire Protection District will review why its ambulance, the one Clark took, was not better secured. <\/p>\n
Placerville police will spend time and money reviewing aspects of their slow chase. The officer who shot Clark will face hard questioning. <\/p>\n
However appropriate those inquiries may be, they must not be allowed to hide the real culprit in this tragic, senseless death – the state’s collapsing mental health infrastructure. <\/p>\n
As the state and local government budget crises deepen, elected officials have chosen to cut already inadequate mental health services. When public clinics close, cut back hours or restrict access, more and more mentally ill Californians wind up wandering the streets, in police custody or crowded into expensive hospital emergency rooms. <\/p>\n
Because of privacy laws, it’s impossible to know the details of Clark’s interaction with the mental health system, but she fits the profile of countless numbers of untreated mentally ill people in our region. <\/p>\n
According to Folsom police, Clark had summoned them to her home six times between November and February. The calls were bizarre. One involved a complaint about an alleged prowler who was trying to cut off her legs; another was about being electrocuted while wearing her headphones. <\/p>\n
Sacramento County cannot confirm if Clark was ever a patient at one of its facilities. However, in the last year, the ability of seriously disturbed people like Clark to access mental health services in Sacramento County has been severely curtailed. <\/p>\n
Over the last three years, the county’s mental health budget has taken a $48 million hit. Sacramento closed its mental health crisis unit on Stockton Boulevard last year and cut inpatient beds for the acutely mentally ill from 100 to 50. Four county-funded private nonprofit mental health clinics reduced patient loads from 2,000 to 900. <\/p>\n
El Dorado County, where Clark was killed, has cut its mental health budget 30 percent, laid off 34 workers and tightened criteria for access to service. The county serves only 1,000 severely mentally ill patients today, a third less than a year ago. <\/p>\n
The mental health system is as vital a part of the public safety network as police and fire protection. If something is not done to protect and rebuild it, more people will end up like Linda Clark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No doubt there will be several official reviews into this week’s shooting death of mental health patient Linda Carol Clark. Administrators at Placerville’s Marshall Hospital will be asked why they don’t have a locked psychiatric unit at their facility or why Clark wasn’t adequately monitored or restrained. The El Dorado Fire Protection District will review […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}