Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/mental-illness/)
Orange County leaders this week unveiled a $40 million, 60,000 square foot mental health campus in Orange aimed at radically shifting regional homelessness spending away from local police and more toward mental health treatment.
As of 5 p.m. Thursday, 3,791 people had signed a change.org petition asking Knott’s Berry Farm to reverse its decision Tuesday to close a virtual reality scare show featuring patients in a mental institution.
For years, local political leaders largely ignored Orange County’s severe shortage of psychiatric beds, which has contributed to, among other things, the current homelessness crisis. But they are beginning to direct their policymaking to the problem.
Officials will travel to Washington D.C. in April for the National Stepping Up Summit, which is focused on reducing number of adults in jails with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders.
Teen pregnancies and high school dropout rates have plummeted in the past decade. But housing insecurity and mental illness hospitalizations are skyrocketing.
Local government officials and nonprofit leaders sat down with the Voice of OC Community Editorial Board last week to talk about how the county succeeded and how it failed this year in the fight against homelessness.
The law, a big issue in the aftermath of the Kelly Thomas beating, would allow court-supervised outpatient treatment of mentally ill adults.