Gov. Newsom Launches New Plan to Help Californians Struggling with Mental Health Challenges, Homelessness

SAN JOSE – Gov. Gavin Newsom March 3, unveiled CARE Court, a new framework to provide individuals with mental health and substance use disorders the care and services they need to get healthy. The proposal, which must be approved by the Legislature, would require counties to provide comprehensive treatment to the most severely impaired and untreated Californians and hold patients accountable to their treatment plan.

CARE Court does not wait until someone is hospitalized or arrested before providing treatment. CARE Court will provide an opportunity for a range of people, including family members, first responders, intervention teams and mental health service providers, among others, to refer individuals suffering from a list of specific ailments, many of them unhoused, and get them into community-based services.

CARE Court offers court-ordered individualized interventions and services, stabilization medication, advanced mental health directives, and housing assistance. Plans can be up to 12 to 24 months. Additionally, this client-centered approach also includes a public defender and a supporter to help individuals make self-directed care decisions.

The CARE Court framework was created using the evidence that many people can stabilize, begin healing, and exit homelessness in less restrictive, community-based care settings. The plan focuses on people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, who may also have substance use challenges, and who lack medical decision-making capacity, and advances an upstream diversion from more restrictive conservatorships or incarceration.

The framework provides individuals with a clinically appropriate, community-based and court-ordered Care Plan. Services are provided to the individual through an outpatient model while they live in the community.

In the event that a participant cannot successfully complete a Care Plan, the individual may be referred for a conservatorship, consistent with current law, with a presumption that no suitable alternatives to conservatorship are available. 

All counties across the state will participate in CARE Court under the proposal. 

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger today voiced support in response to the Governor’s Care Court plan.

Barger said in part: “I commend Governor Newsom’s efforts to bring healing to the indigent individuals living with debilitating mental illness on our streets. We need a coordinated and consistent approach to help these individuals, and Care Court is poised to deliver that through the courts system. 

Certainly, the onus of providing comprehensive treatment will fall on counties’ shoulders. This will require an investment in resources and infrastructure. I look forward to working through those details when the time comes.”