The toll of one man’s mental illness: 17 criminal cases, six competency hearings, one failed conservatorship
LA TimesThe reunion was a replay of so many painful encounters that she could no longer keep them straight in her thoughts. Then he ended up at Community Hospital of San Bernardino, where a doctor who knew Steve proposed filing a petition to place John under a conservatorship, a procedure under state law that would give a public guardian almost total control over John’s life, with the power to place him in a locked facility and force him to take medication. In February of 2014, a judge in L.A. County’s mental health court found John gravely disabled and placed him in the care of the public guardian. “It’s a godsend because it’s a placement,” Dusseault thought when John’s public guardian had him transferred from jail to a locked residential program in Pico Rivera. “Sometimes with a bottle of medication, sometimes nothing.” There’s no accounting for the cost in dollars of John’s untreated mental illness.
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