Captured a rainbow this morning. Took scores of photos at the beach. After a time Leo got down on the sand. Not sure what he was thinking. As for me I continue to wrestle with the insanity of current events. A few minutes after I took this photo, we were caught in a downpour.
Hi Richard, I see your emails and like them a lot. Here’s one that I sent to some folks the other day. It will update you on how I have spent this part of my sorta retirement:
A few years ago, a former Capitol Hill aide gave me his take on Sisyphus. The guy loved his rock. Why else would he have spent eternity pushing it uphill?
So it is with this boulder of mine.
I have been exploring the politics and history of the mental health care system for my book tentatively titled, Broken, since 2021, though really for years before that. After interviewing scores of people, visiting several archives, reading many thousands of pages of legislative, congressional and personal records, and writing 100,000 words, I emailed my manuscript to my editor at the University of California Press last month.
My editor’s initial reaction was that the manuscript was much longer than the 80,000 words I had contracted to deliver. None of my words are written in gold. Every piece of writing needs editing, and any piece can be cut. But I encouraged her to read the prologue and one chapter I especially liked.
She read the entire book, liked it, and told me she didn’t see much to cut. I nonetheless went through it once more and pared it back. There will be many more edits and hurdles between now and when I finally manage to push this rock to the summit. I trust it won’t be an eternity, though it may feel that way.
I’ll keep you all informed via future posts, if you would like.
As is the University of California Press’s practice, the book is being peer reviewed. Once that is done, a faculty panel will review it. I fully expect the peers and faculty members will have comments and suggestions, and I welcome them. I want this book to be the best that it can be.
The book is part history and politics. I got to know more about President Kennedy and the Kennedy sisters who inspired him, Govs Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan, Presidents Carter and Reagan, and many other figures such as Frank Lanterman and Art Bolton who are less well known, or known only to their immediate families and circles of friends. Three especially helpful sources died during the course of my reporting, George Steffes, who was Gov. Reagan’s first legislative affairs secretary, Stu Spencer, who helped elect Reagan as governor and president, and Dr. Cap Thomson, who was involved in early efforts to shape California mental health care law. They were giants.
The book also is a story about my brother Frank, who was nine years my senior and suffered a severe head injury when he crashed his car at age 22. Frank spent most of the rest of his days in California state hospitals. It’s also about my parents, Frances and Frank, who battled to ensure their eldest had the best possible care. They’re all gone now, and so my reporting was in part an archeological dig. One important discovery was a video of Frank taken by his therapists at Napa.
I knew my parents were active in a nascent movement by parents to provide better care for people with mental illness and, by extension, brain injury. I did not know my mother joined other moms at a sleep-in at Jerry Brown’s office in 1975 seeking improved care for people with brain disease and injury. I had no idea that a letter my father wrote in 1977 was part of the records of President Jimmy Carter’s commission chaired by Rosalynn Carter on mental health care, and knew little about the history of 1977 legislation my mother proposed and lobbied for during Jerry Brown’s first years in office. That small piece of legislation still delivers help to people in California state hospitals.
I was busy in college and building my career in journalism, and only became more involved in Frank’s care after our mother died in 1980. I was his conservator first with my father and then on my own, until he died 20 years later.
The book is California-focused, in part because it’s a place I know and have written about for more than 40 years, but also because the story of the broken mental health care system is well told from here. California led all other states in deinstitutionalization, some of it for the good and much of it not.
No politician wanted what we have now–open-air asylums and 40 percent of the inmates in California state prisons having a diagnosis of a mental illness. They had the best of intentions. But with a few notable exceptions, politicians didn’t see the upside to focusing on the issue.
We’ll never return to the days of large state asylums, and we shouldn’t. But in recent years, California has altered laws in ways that will make it easier to house and treat people who are too ill to know that they need help.
Whether you approve or disapprove of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stand on a variety of issues, there is no question that he has devoted more time, thought and money to improving the broken mental health care system than any governor since deinstitutionalization. There is much left to be done. Fixing a broken system cannot happen in two four-year terms. But there are reasons for hope, and that is part of the story I am telling too.
The daily newspaper reporter in me wishes the book could be published today. But I don’t expect to see it in print or in e-book or hear it in audio form for a year or so. That means that for the next year, I will be doing more reporting and writing on the topic.
I look forward to gauging the level of commitment on the part of candidates seeking to replace Newsom. Their commitment will determine the outcome of changes that have been made. I will write what I find as I continue pushing this rock of mine.
67Steffen.com 
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