California has failed the homeless and the mentally ill. It’s time for change.

In 1975, my father appeared as Billy Bibbit in the film “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” Though he didn’t know it at the time, in just a few years the frustrations of mental healthcare in America would become extremely personal to him, when it would come to affect his second wife — my mother, Joni.

In jail, she explained the “mind-control battalion” had surrounded the apartment. I asked her where she would go when released, and she said they terrorized her wherever she went. When I mentioned checking in to a hospital, she asked who I had been talking to. When the police released her that time, she was gone for weeks. It would be two years until they found her dead on the floor of a drug house, overdosed from the heroin, meth and probably Fentanyl she had been using to cope.

The unspoken truth at the center of the homelessness epidemic is that a large portion of this population need greater care than just housing. It is estimated by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Center that 52% of the homeless in California are either severally mentally ill or addicted to hard drugs. It’s important to note that these are self-assessed polls; the actual number is believed to be higher.

A Spring 2021 Harvard research study found that after ten years, only 12% of the people placed in a housing-first apartment remained housed. In 2018, the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “The committee found no substantial evidence that [permanent supportive housing] contributes to improved health outcomes, notwithstanding the intuitive logic that it should.”

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