This historic California legislation changed how we treat those with severe mental illness

In 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a bill that turned out to be one of the most consequential pieces of state legislation in the latter half of the 20th century.

Since leaving daily journalism after more than 40 years, I have freelanced, written a book, am working on a second book — and I have taken the time to research that law, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which governs how we care for or don’t care for people with severe mental illness. The law sought to “end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of persons with mental health disorders,” among other things. If I had taken the time to do this work years ago, my reporting would have been better informed and richer. There is a lesson in that for younger reporters and their editors.

My initial interest stemmed from my family story. Late on June 25, 1969, a week before the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act took effect, my brother Frank, then 22, was coming home from work when he drove his car off the road and smashed his head, an all-too common injury among young men who think they’re immortal and drive too fast. 

The surgery that saved his life was not unlike a prefrontal lobotomy, the sort of surgery carried out on thousands of people with mental illness in the 1940s, most infamously on Rosemary Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy’s sister. Frank could walk and talk but the lobectomy removed a significant part of what made Frank who he had been. He became impulsive, unable to control bodily functions, and, out of frustration, destructive to property.

I was busy finishing high school and college and starting my career, while our mother, a nurse, tried to save Frank, first caring for him at home, then in board and care homes in San Jose. When the board and care operators evicted him, our parents placed him in a nursing home. When that home couldn’t cope with him, my parents turned to the state. Frank spent most of the rest of his life in state hospitals — Agnews, Stockton, and Camarillo, all long since shuttered, and finally Napa.

Frank wasn’t mentally ill. He had a brain injury. But the law treated him as if he were mentally ill and for most of his adult life, he shared wards with people who were diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses. 

I was covering courts for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Frank was at Camarillo State Hospital in 1980 when our mother died. It fell to me to drive up to Camarillo and deliver the news. I can still hear his primal cry. My father, a real estate broker, asked me to step up by becoming Frank’s co-conservator, a process set forth by laws Assemblyman Frank Lanterman authored or shaped. 

That meant my father and I, and then later I alone after my father had a debilitating stroke, had control over Frank’s affairs, including health care decisions and finances, although he had no money beyond monthly Social Security disability payments, which went to the state for his care. 

Frank was never homeless or jailed, and received care until he died in 2000 of a seizure tied to his head injury. But people like him ended up in much worse situations. And so, as a reporter in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, and later an editorial writer and editorial page editor in Sacramento, I paid particular attention to stories involving mental illness, developmental disability, and brain trauma, and wrote several stories on the topics over the decades. (I always let my editors know about Frank.)

I am reporting a book about the history and politics of the mental health care system — and my family’s experience in that system — to be published by the University of California Press. To understand pieces of that story, I used a grant from the Center for Health Journalism California Health Equity Fellowship and Lori Yearwood Fund for Reporting on Homelessness to help research Assemblyman Frank Lanterman and the legislation that bears his name. 

Google and Lexis-Nexis are of little help. Lanterman, a Republican from La Cañada Flintridge, was a giant in his time, serving 28 years in the Assembly. But he retired in 1978 and died in 1981, before the existence of the internet as we journalists have come to know it. 

I have spent many days in the archives of the California Secretary of State, where old bill files are stored; the Hoover Institution, which houses records of Gov. Reagan’s administration; the Lanterman House museum in La Canada Flintridge; and at USC, where many of Lanterman’s papers are stored.

I am a believer in shoe leather reporting and face-to-face interviews. There is no substitute for first-hand observation. But history matters too. In those archives, I have found gems that will be important for my book, and resulted in two stories posted at the nonprofit journalism site, Capitol Weekly–one about a 1966 report that was the predicate for the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, and another that is a profile of Lanterman. 

I cannot help but think how what I have learned in dusty files would have informed my reporting over the decades. I understand the press of deadlines and pressure of ever smaller news budgets. But if you’re carving a beat, take time to understand its origins.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act has been in effect for 55 years. Before its passage, people relegated to state hospitals had fewer rights than felons serving hard prison time. They couldn’t vote, marry, procreate, hold professional licenses, or have a say in their treatment. Patients received little if any therapy and if they acted up, they could be physically restrained. 

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was years in the making. When it was introduced in 1967, its backers described it as the “Magna Carta” for people with severe mental illness. By acknowledging that patients had basic rights, the law sped the emptying of state hospitals. 

In the decades since its passage, lobbyists representing the ACLU, Disability Rights-California and other advocates have fought efforts to overhaul it. Until recently, legislators from both parties hesitated to tweak the law. 

As a Capitol reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later a columnist and editorial writer for the Sacramento Bee, I covered some of those legislative battles. But I did not know fundamental details about the law — how the final bill was gutted and amended on the final day of the legislative session in 1967, and how it was a compromise that guaranteed that Reagan’s administration and local governments would have no legal or financial obligation to provide care for people once housed in state hospitals, or those who in an earlier day would have been in asylums.

Internal Reagan administration documents show that soon after the law took effect, the number of prison inmates with psychiatric issues increased, and private nursing homes began caring for larger numbers of people with severe mental illness. 

In the years after its passage, Lanterman and his coauthors, Democratic Sens. Nicholas Petris of Oakland and Alan Short of Stockton, became alarmed at increasing numbers of homeless people struggling with mental illness — an issue that has become a dominant issue in California politics today.

I wish I had known more of that history when I wrote columns and editorials for the Sacramento Bee in the 2000s, and in 1999 when I teamed with Julie Marquis of the Los Angeles Times to produce a series about the broken mental health care system and wrote about large numbers of people with mental illness living — and dying — in nursing homes.

California State Librarian Greg Lucas, a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, often quotes President Harry Truman’s line: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.” Past very often is prologue. The lesson I offer is simple: Take the time to understand a story by starting at its origin.