Assisted outpatient treatment comes to California--or does it?

After five years of legislative tussling, California has passed a law, written by Assemblywoman Helen Thomson (a former psychiatric nurse), that purports to provide for court-ordered (involuntary) outpatient treatment for certain persons with mental illness. The law, which went into effect January 1, 2003, is alternatively titled Laura’s Law and The Assisted Outpatient Treatment Demonstration Project Act of 2002. Laura Wilcox, a 19-year-old county mental health worker in California, was shot to death by a chronically mentally ill man who had refused treatment. The California law is modeled on New York’s Kendra’s Law, enacted in 1999 out of the furor over the nationally publicized tragedy of 32-year-old Kendra Webdale, who was pushed in front of a subway train and killed by a psychotic individual who had been chronically noncompliant with treatment in the intervals between his numerous involuntary hospitalizations.