Advocates Fear Collapse of Care for Mentally Ill : Health: Proposition 134 is backed as a way to replenish the planned $40-million cutback in county.

A mental health system undermined by years of inadequate funding will collapse entirely in Los Angeles County if $40 million in cuts are imposed by the Board of Supervisors, mental health officials, workers and patients testified at a special hearing Wednesday called by Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman.

None of the other four supervisors attended the hearing. But scores of advocates for the mentally ill did. More than two dozen of them gave vivid and, at times, emotional accounts of a mental health system already overburdened and inaccessible to some of the neediest in the county.

Edelman said the hearing portrayed a situation “more horrifying” than he expected. He plans to send transcripts to state and county officials in hopes of finding additional funding. He also said he would ask the Board of Supervisors to endorse Proposition 134, the liquor tax measure on the November ballot. Of about $800 million in new revenues anticipated should the tax pass, 15% would go to mental health services, largely replenishing this fiscal year’s $40-million shortfall in state aid to Los Angeles County’s mental health programs.

That would maintain the status quo, which no one who spoke Wednesday considered adequate.

Even as he testified, Irwin C. Hansen, president of the California Medical Center on South Grand Avenue, said a mentally ill patient was strapped to a gurney in his emergency room under 24-hour watch but receiving no psychiatric care. The patient has spent the last five days restrained, waiting for a psychiatric bed to become available in a county hospital, Hansen said.

Because California Medical Center has no psychiatry division, it cannot treat the patient, Hansen said. Yet the patient has been judged dangerously unstable, and cannot be released, he said.

Other witnesses gave similar accounts of a gridlock in health care. Several accused state and county officials of a short-sighted approach to cost-cutting.

Amy Weiss, assistant clinical director of the San Fernando Valley Mental Health Center, spoke of a program for about 60 severely disturbed adolescents from broken homes that would be forced by the cuts to drop one-quarter of its patients. Their future, she said, is predictable: homelessness, gang involvement, drug and alcohol abuse and crime.

“I know the names and faces of these children, but we all know that their neglect comes at tremendous social and economic cost,” she said.

Kerry Tingly, director of the Long Beach Homeless Assistance Program for the mentally ill spoke of a delusional client who was refused admittance at the county’s Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance because it was full. The man spent several days wandering in traffic and picking fights. Finally, he returned to the program’s center, severely beaten. Hearing that the hospital had to accept patients brought in by the police, Tingly called the Long Beach police to arrest the patient. Three squad cars and six officers were dispatched, first taking him to the police station for booking, and then to the hospital.

“We have all sorts of crime in Long Beach” and the officers’ time could have been better spent, Tingly said.

Roberto Quiroz, director of the county department of Mental Health, offered no defense. On the contrary, he said, if the liquor tax ballot measure fails and the proposed cuts are implemented, the county mental health system will face “disaster.”

The system left intact would be little more than a skeletal relic of the 1950s, Quiroz said. To underscore his point that current funding already is woefully inadequate, Quiroz cited New York, a city of 7.9 million people who are served by 44 hospitals with psychiatric services for a total of 5,906 in-patient adult beds and 452 pediatric beds.

By contrast, Los Angeles County has 12 hospitals, 1,410 adult and 195 pediatric beds serving a population of 9 million.