University Honors

California's mental health system has undergone a series of reforms over the past six decades, each framed as a meaningful improvement on what came before. The deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s, formalized through the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, ended indefinite involuntary commitment and was widely understood as a civil liberties victory. But the community-based system that was supposed to replace state hospitals was never funded at the scale it required, and as institutional beds declined without a comparable expansion of outpatient services, individuals with serious mental illness increasingly cycled through emergency holds, county jails, and conservatorship placements. This paper argues that forced psychiatric intervention in California did not disappear after deinstitutionalization but instead changed where and how it occurred, particularly for unhoused individuals, for whom the gap between the promise of community care and its reality has been most acute. Drawing on legal scholarship, legislative history, and recent policy data, it traces that shift from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It concludes by examining California's CARE Court program, established in 2022 and expanded in 2025, as the latest instance of a pattern that has defined the state's approach to mental health policy for more than half a century: legal mechanisms that expand before the infrastructure they depend on is in place.