LA County's big program for people living with mental illness needs refining, officials say

More than a year-and-a-half in, Los Angeles County Supervisors say California’s big plan to get more people living with serious mental illness into treatment needs improving.

Known as CARE Court, the program launched in L.A. County in December 2023 and was promised as an innovative approach to bringing thousands of Californians living with untreated serious mental illness — like schizophrenia — under the care of mental health professionals.

CARE Court allows family members, behavioral health workers, first responders and others to ask a court — by way of a petition — to step in with a voluntary care plan for someone living with serious mental illness. If the plan fails, the person could be hospitalized or referred to a conservatorship.

But so far the number of people served by the program is far below initial projections, with 386 petitions from the program’s inception in 2023 through Feb. 28, 2025.

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The vast majority of those petitions, 305, came from concerned family members.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion from members Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger, which, among other things, directs the L.A. County Department of Mental Health to report back in four months with ways to streamline the process for referrals from first responders, like paramedics.

The motion states that there “may be an opportunity for DMH to expedite the process for first responders to refer frequent 911 callers to CARE Court if they meet criteria, and meetings to discuss this issue are under way.”

A county report on CARE Court lists outreach and training for first responders, including law enforcement and L.A. County paramedics, as an opportunity for this year.

“That is a big issue that we need to train our first responders on this as a tool and mechanism,” Traute Winters, Executive Director of NAMI Greater Los Angeles County, told LAist.

Winters also said it became clear from what she’s heard from families, as well as county listening sessions, that family members who do file a petition hoping to get help for a loved one feel out of the loop once the process starts.

“They petition and then they’re not involved or not updated on what’s going on or included. And often the family can give a lot of history and insight,” Winters said.

The motion approved Tuesday also directs the Department of Mental Health to look at ways to improve “family and petitioner inclusion after initial applications are submitted.”

The 2024 Point-In-Time count found that 24% of unhoused people over the age of 18 self-reported that they live with a serious mental illness, according to the Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority, which conducted the annual count.

"This opportunity to get people living with schizophrenia the care they desperately need is too valuable not to keep trying to make it the best it can be," Hahn said in a statement.

Still, some civil liberties groups, including the ACLU of Southern California, have argued that funding directed toward CARE Court should instead be going to community-based care.

In 2022, before CARE Court became law, 40 groups — including JusticeLA, Disability Rights California and ACLU California Action — signed a letter saying the program would strip “people with mental health disabilities of their right to make their own decisions about their lives.”