withasmoothroundstone:

The Lanterman Act, or the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Act, is an act governing the rights of and services for people with developmental disabilities in the state of California.  Under the Lanterman Act, people are supposed to be guaranteed the right to live in their own homes regardless of degree of disability.  This doesn’t always play out in practice, but it’s supposed to, and it gives people the leverage to do so.  And that’s just one of many important things it does.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short act is about involuntary commitment for people with psychiatric disabilities in the state of California.  It deals mostly with 72-hour involuntary holds (a.k.a. 5150), 14-day involuntary holds (a.k.a.5250), and temporary conservatorship.

I was once dealing with an… interesting… psych survivor/ex-patient group in California.  The woman who ran it seemed so desperate to find any ally anywhere, and any foothold anywhere, that it didn’t actually matter whether the ally or the foothold made sense.  

For example, she was always carrying around Scientology posters at protests.  Scientology has always regarded psychiatry as competition, which is their original reason for being anti-psychiatry.  Before Scientology was made into a fake religion, the basics of Scientology were touted as an alternative to psychiatry.  Psychiatry was in direct competition with them.  After they became a full-on cult, they turned on psychiatry as systematically as they turned on their detractors, the IRS, and anyone else they hated.  They didn’t care about the human rights abuses of psychiatric patients, they just saw those human rights abuses as a means to make psychiatry look bad.  If the human rights abuses weren’t there, and psychiatry was some kind of miracle wonder science free of any serious ethical problems, they’d have just made something up, just like they randomly try to make their high-profile detractors look like pedophiles.  Scientology does things to its own members that are just as bad as the worst things in psychiatry.  And the likelihood of terrible and even deadly things go up if they basically identify someone as crazy.  Here’s an example of what they call the “Introspection Rundown”, a response to a “psychotic episode” or “complete mental breakdown”:

Declaration of Roxanne Friend, a former Scientologist, declaration given under penalty of perjury, references depositions.  Read that over and tell me how it differs from the general range of fucked-up things involuntary psychiatry will often do to someone they deem to be psychotic or having a mental breakdown. And if you want for some reason to hear about a more nightmarish Introspection Rundown, google Lisa McPherson. (Spoiler: She died as a direct result of the Rundown.)

I’m sorry – I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but I refuse to be bedfellows with a destructive cult just because it happens to think that a very destructive industry is competition.  And I refuse to believe anything I hear about psychiatry from Scientology unless i’ve heard it from another source that isn’t a Scientology front group.  (The Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology front group.  Just so everyone’s clear.)  

Also to make it perfectly clear:  Scientology has not helped the psychiatric survivor/ex patient/mad pride sort of movements.  All it’s done is make everyone convinced that former psychiatric patients criticizing psychiatry are actually just a bunch of Scientologists and safely ignored.  Pretty much every time I express a view critical of psychiatry as a whole, someone tries to tell me – or anyone around who will listen – that I must be a Scientologist.  Between Scientology and the so-called dissident psychiatrists, it’s very hard for actual crazy people to criticize psychiatry and be taken seriously.  Like, it’s bad enough that being crazy is enough to discredit us in a lot of people’s eyes – I’ve heard psych survivors described collectively, by psychiatrists, as everything from “psychotic people who have unfortunately never let go of their paranoid process” to “borderline personalities who like drama and attention”.  But even if we get past that stage, we’re going to be associated with L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige, Peter Breggin, and R. D. Laing, whether we like it or not.  And that’s only the start of the misconceptions about us and what our actual views are.  We pretty much can’t get a word in edgewise because everyone already things they know what we’re thinking.  

And bottom line– Scientology/the CCHR make this all worse, not better.  They hinder our ability to get human rights abuses exposed and dealt with.  And then they try to recruit people into what’s basically one giant human rights abuse disguised as a religion for a combination of tax-evasion and recruiting purposes.

But to her, they didn’t like psychiatry so she was on board 100% and didn’t care what anyone said about the hellish things that happened in Scientology.  (And yet wanted people to listen to her about the hellish things that happens in psychiatry.)

So on that note…

One day I was grumbling about the governor.  He was threatening to repeal the Lanterman Act to save money.  (It was unclear that this would actually save money, but even if it would, that’s not an acceptable reason to remove people’s right to live in our own homes.)  I was legitimately afraid, because I was getting Supported Living Services through the Regional Center system and all that could fall apart and I could end up in an institution permanently, or on the streets, depending on whether the system chose abuse or neglect as their basic response.

Her response? “The Lanterman Act is what makes involuntary commitment possible.  They should repeal it.”

I was like… “I’ve read the entire thing.  I didn’t see that there.”

She insisted it was, in fact, there.

I do have reading comprehension issues.  I concluded I must’ve missed it.  I told her that removing the Lanterman Act would likely land me in an institution.

She started yelling at me about how I was – this is almost a direct quote – “just like the people in the concentration camps who were willing to sell out their fellow inmates because they got a few favors from the Nazis”.  Which… seemed pretty harsh for a brief conversation about a topic we both seemed fuzzy about the details of.  And she decided to support the governor because of his desire to repeal the Lanterman Act.

I later scoured the Lanterman Act and couldn’t find any of the shit she talked about.  I had little enough self-confidence that I assumed I must be totally misunderstanding something major.  

Much later, almost by accident, I learned two things.

One, I was right.  The Lanterman Act is not the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, and the governor had no plans on repealing the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.

Two, even if it had been the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, I don’t think she was thinking it through.  Because… the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act sucks.  In huge ways.  It allows for things that are quite dangerous to people.  I’ve been 5150ed and 5250ed more times than I can count.  

The local adult psych ward was a death trap I was lucky to escape alive without getting snagged into a hold cycle until something happened I couldn’t get out of (I have a deadly reaction to one of their favorite meds, and both psych professionals and ER professionals are trained to be cynical about anyone who says they react to them, even though my reaction was originally witnessed and documented by a gaggle of professionals).  They routinely drugged people until their throats tightened up enough they had trouble speaking, and then took them to their commitment hearings in that state to be talked about in the third person and made to look as incompetent as possible while unable to talk back.  One thing our group did was visit to keep an eye on patients who didn’t have anyone else looking out for them.  And they did everything in their power, including spontaneously changing visiting hours the moment they saw us, to keep us out of there.

So I’m no fan of California’s involuntary commitment policy or the fact that people could be stuck in places like that particular psych ward.

But repealing the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act would not actually get rid of involuntary commitment, nor would it improve the conditions for people under involuntary commitment.  What people don’t all seem to realize is that the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was put into place to limit indefinite commitment times and to limit the reasons for involuntary commitment.  It didn’t do enough, obviously.  It didn’t end it.  But before the L-P-S Act, you could commit people indefinitely and for incredibly vague reasons.  So the L-P-S act overall reduced commitment times and made it harder to commit people.  People who want commitment to be easier are always complaining about how hard it’s been made to commit people.  It’s not that hard, in my experience, but it’s still harder than it could be.  Harder than it used to be.  Harder than it would be without it.

If they want to do away with involuntary commitment, that doesn’t take repealing the L-P-S Act, it takes writing new law to govern what would actually happen instead, and then repealing or replacing or amending it or however that kind of thing works.  It would, in fact, probably very similar to parts of the actual Lanterman Act, at least at first.  The Lanterman Act didn’t do away with institutionalization of people with developmental disabilities, but it took huge steps in that direction and made alternatives to institutions part of the new way things were structured.  

And it is really inappropriate to ask someone to risk backsliding into institutions after progress has been made in doing away with those institutions, just because you think it might make it harder to put you in an institution for 3 to 14 days.  And to gratuitously call them a Nazi collaborator if they don’t instantly agree with you – on a point of view that in this case didn’t even turn out to be based on something real.  So for all I know this lady is still out there trying to get people with developmental disabilities put in institutions permanently so that (as she imagines things) it’s harder to put her on a temporary hold in an institution.  This is why it’s important to actually look up a law and its history as best you can, before throwing resources into changing it.  Because whether she hit the right law or the wrong one, getting it repealed would in either case result in long-term, even indefinite or permanent, involuntary institution stays for a lot of people.

Mistaking Lanterman for Lanterman-Petris-Short makes sense, but it’s a hell of a mistake to make and all the reason to be more careful.  And I wouldn’t put it past some law somewhere to give rights to one group of disabled people and take that same right away from another group of disabled people simultaneously, but you can’t just yank the rights out from under that first group of people without replacing it with something else, or you’re just reversing the situation.