Understanding California's 50-year old conservatorship law: is there room for improvement? An interview with gifted law student Savanah Walseth.
03/20/22 • 57 min
Savanah Walseth is a student at Loyola Law School and was most recently a program manager for the L.A. County Department of Health “Housing for Health” Program. At a young age, she is guided by both lessons learned “in the trenches” given her experience in homeless outreach and engagement for People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), but also in programmatic work managing the COVID response in L.A. County. During the past two years, she was managing the county’s response involving testing, street medicine, outbreak management and contact tracing among the homeless population. Savanah is a graduate of Reed College in Portland.
The topic of this podcast interview is drawn from a paper written by Savanah for a Mental Disability Law Seminar in late 2021. The paper is entitled: Grave Disability: Seeking Restructure through New Definitions.
This interview will provide a basic primer on the California law that governs involuntary hospitalization, the definition of grave disability and conservatorships, the Lanterman Petris Short Act, passed in 1967. We will touch upon the fact that this type of conservatorship differs from the widely publicized conservatorship that Britney Spears was subjected to for nearly 14 years. That is called a probate conservatorship. This 2021 article from CalMatters does a good job distinguishing between the two types of conservatorships.
Savanah’s goal in her law career is to be a civil rights litigator – focusing upon housing and disability rights, especially in the intersections of homelessness and mental health.
Savanah Walseth is a student at Loyola Law School and was most recently a program manager for the L.A. County Department of Health “Housing for Health” Program. At a young age, she is guided by both lessons learned “in the trenches” given her experience in homeless outreach and engagement for People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), but also in programmatic work managing the COVID response in L.A. County. During the past two years, she was managing the county’s response involving testing, street medicine, outbreak management and contact tracing among the homeless population. Savanah is a graduate of Reed College in Portland.
The topic of this podcast interview is drawn from a paper written by Savanah for a Mental Disability Law Seminar in late 2021. The paper is entitled: Grave Disability: Seeking Restructure through New Definitions.
This interview will provide a basic primer on the California law that governs involuntary hospitalization, the definition of grave disability and conservatorships, the Lanterman Petris Short Act, passed in 1967. We will touch upon the fact that this type of conservatorship differs from the widely publicized conservatorship that Britney Spears was subjected to for nearly 14 years. That is called a probate conservatorship. This 2021 article from CalMatters does a good job distinguishing between the two types of conservatorships.
Savanah’s goal in her law career is to be a civil rights litigator – focusing upon housing and disability rights, especially in the intersections of homelessness and mental health.
Previous Episode
Unglamourous expertise: Recovery from acute psychosis to reflections on system change. A conversation with Lee Davis, Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board
Lee Davis is currently the chair of the Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board. In her official bio, she indicates that she is a Civil Engineer and Journeyman Electrician by profession. She comes to her work on the Advisory Board as a woman with lived experience of a mood disorder.
In this interview, we explore three themes about which Lee is passionate:
1. The case for involuntary treatment
2. The lack of capacity in our so-called continuum of care
3. Her assertion that the failure to invest in the requisite infrastructure to treat people and promote their recovery is morally wrong and socially debilitating
In addition, we explore Lee’s extraordinary life journey, about which she writes with remarkable vulnerability in her blogs.
Being Bipolar. Maybe it is my unisex name. Maybe it is... | by Lee Andrea Davis | Medium
Other organizations she references in this interview:
Alameda County Families Advocating for the Seriously Mentally Ill
Articles about the February 2022 sleep-in organized by FASMI with which Lee was involved.
Oakland: Protesters sleep on sidewalk, demand mental health care (mercurynews.com)
Link to the annual report for the Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board
Next Episode
Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. A conversation with the author, Dr. Tom Insel
Dr. Tom Insel is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and an influential voice in the national conversation that is gaining momentum around the failures of the American mental health system and the need to do better for the humans that are suffering as a result. His new book, released in February 2022, is a worthy read, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health.
In this episode we talk about how his life journey informs his current work and advocacy as he enters this chapter in his life. He speaks with a certain humility about how assumptions he made early in his career, or even while head of the National Institute for Mental Health, have changed as he has spent time with families and people with lived experience. His eyes were further opened to the challenges in our communities as he toured the state on a listening tour in behalf of California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom.
He speaks with eloquence about the profoundly simple idea (yet hard to implement or fund in our current system) to focus on People, Place and Purpose to support an individual’s recovery from their mental illness.
Dr. Insel joined our delegation in September 2019 when we attended the international mental health conference in Trieste Italy and he shares some memories from that experience.
Additional links and resources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/american-mental-health-crisis-healing/622052/
Additional articles from his website:
Press — Thomas Insel, MD (thomasinselmd.com)
Finally, Dr. Insel is part of a team that has created a new information source MindSite News.
From their Mission Statement:
MindSite News is a new nonprofit, nonpartisan digital journalism organization dedicated to reporting on mental health in America, exposing rampant policy failures and spotlighting efforts to solve them. We seek to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the workings and failings of the U.S. mental health system and to impact that system through our reporting, making it more equitable, effective, transparent and humane in its care for individuals and families struggling with mental illness.
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