History

Current mental health law in California can be traced to the late 1960s. At the time, the growing mental health movement, fueled by Thomas Szaz and R.D. Laing, was leading a push against the rather vague grounds that supported detention based on mental illness. A nice book about the history of California mental health was written by Dr. Joel Braslow at UCLA.

This push happened to coincide with Ronald Reagan's desire to pass Proposition 13 (which greatly contained property taxes) and save money. Reagan closed many state psychiatric hospitals and all patients (some of whom had been hospitalized for decades) were simply released. The promised increase in community mental health care never occurred.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act was passed by the California legislature in 1967. The original intent of the Act was to ensure that patients received mental health care, but along the way, it's intent was altered. As passed, it greatly restricted the actions of mental health care professionals and provided numerous opportunities for patients to be released from legal holds.

The LPS act was included in Calfornia legal code beginning at §5000 of the Welfare and Institutions Code (WIC). The different sections of the code have provided their names to the sort detention described. For example, §5150 describes the initial 72-hour detention.