By Brian Krans, California Healthline, December 12, 2019
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has promised to tackle her city’s homelessness crisis, a vexing situation involving drug abuse and mental illness that is compounded by the city’s high housing costs. Breed has asked Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, most recently the medical director for psychiatric emergency services at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, to help solve the problem.
In March, she appointed him to the newly created position of director of mental health reform. His main role is to help the city improve its mental health and addiction treatment for people experiencing homelessness.
“I had the opportunity being there on the front lines, providing services directly to clients, to better understand and appreciate when a person has that combination of homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse,” said Nigusse Bland. He has worked in several Bay Area county mental health systems, first as an integrated care psychiatrist with Alameda Health System, then as chief of psychiatry for Contra Costa County.
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