For the past nine years, Linda Orozco has been looking for the impossible in all the wrong places. Tuesday morning, she may have finally found what she’s been looking for.
Since 2007, Orozco has sought help for her son, now 36, afflicted with the twin demons of schizophrenia and methamphetamine addiction. For the past three years, her son has been living on the streets. Orozco estimates he’s been arrested 20 times and committed to the county’s Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) at least six times, the latter for posing an imminent threat to himself or others. So long as he’s taking his medications, Orozco says, her son does all right. The problem is he tends to go off his meds. In the past year alone, county mental-health and drug workers have ordered Orozco’s son to detox facilities located in Los Angeles’ skid row, Oxnard, and Santa Maria. Each time, he leaves a day after checking in. This puts him behind the eight ball with county probation officers. For one such violation, his mom said, he spent six months in the Wasco State Prison.
For the past several years, Orozco has been working with a group of mental-health advocates known as Families ACT! This group has never shied away from making noise, and its members were only too happy to help Orozco rattle cages.
Ten o’clock this Tuesday morning, Orozco had an appointment with higher-ups at Behavioral Wellness and all her son’s case managers. This time, they agreed to initiate the conservatorship proceedings. A judge will have to approve. There will be a trial. Orozco has no idea what will happen next. But for the first time in years, she has hope.
Less than an hour after Orozco’s meeting, the Santa Barbara County Supervisors met and deliberated over major policy changes that could drastically expand the options available to mentally ill people like Orozco’s son. For the first time ever, the supervisors were given a menu of all the residential treatment options now available. And for the first time ever, the report — prepared by Gleghorn and her housing assistant Laura Zeitz — detailed the most significant gaps in treatment. Most critically, Gleghorn and Zeitz provided a proposal for how those gaps could be plugged.
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