The woman known as Miss Chevron has lived on a Los Angeles County bus bench for nine years, which is why people just call her by the name of the gas station behind her.
Wrapped up to her chin in jackets and blankets, her eyes shoot a fierce, hard stare straight ahead. Believed to be in her 70s, she won’t tell anyone her real name and doesn’t want anyone to tell her what to do or where to go.
But that doesn’t stop members of L.A. County’s SB 82 Mobile Triage Team from trying. It’s one of eight Department of Mental Health squads spread across the county, reaching out to the homeless and coaxing people with mental health needs to accept services and housing.
Funding for the program is in flux. The effort is currently paid for by Senate Bill 82, known as the Mental Health Wellness Act. Passed in 2013, the bill provided $32 million in grants to hire up to 600 triage personnel statewide. That funding comes to an end this summer.
But that’s when money from the voter-approved state Prop. 63 is expected to kick in. Known as the millionaire’s tax because it levies a 1 percent tax on annual incomes of $1 million or greater, Prop. 63 has generated millions since 2005
Across Southern California, the need for such outreach is increasing – and increasingly visible. Experts estimate L.A. county has about 58,000 homeless people. About 30 percent have reported being diagnosed with a mental illness, according to a count conducted last year.
For as long as the funding holds out, the teams will continue to reach out to their clients with calm, with patience and with persistence. Even after Miss Chevron lit her own hat on fire in a fit of rage, threw food at members of the team and cursed them and their mothers in ugly ways, the team came back.
“We can’t reach everyone, but we’re trying,” said Teresa Rivera, a psychiatric social worker who leads one the SB82 team across the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. “It takes determination to do this job.”
Like Saint Monica, the Catholic patron of patience and persistence, members of the outreach team believe if they visit her consistently along the San Fernando Valley’s busy Sherman Way – to remind her there is a nearby winter shelter to sleep in and a place where women can take warm showers – Miss Chevron will trust humanity again.
The work is challenging, they note, from the wide geography they cover to the people they meet.
“They can’t acknowledge they need help. When they are not mentally healthy, they cannot focus on health issues because they don’t even know (those issues) exist.”
— Sandy Carson, National Alliance on Mental Illness member[hhmc]
On any day, Rivera – working alongside a volunteer and a community worker – will drive hundreds of miles in a county-issued Prius to find homeless people in their territory, the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. That takes them anywhere from the edges of the Angeles National Forest to the fringes of the Santa Monica Mountains.
They respond to referrals. The calls have been constant in the last few years, said Ramona Casupang, the team’s supervisor and a licensed clinical social worker with the county’s department of mental health.
The numbers show it. There were almost 7,500 homeless people counted last year in the area combed by the team. That’s a 14 percent increase from 2016.
“People will call us and say: ‘there’s a homeless person in our neighborhood, can you pick them up?'” Casupang said, as if it’s easy to just take someone away from the street, she added, and just put them in a shelter.
They help people obtain health and food benefits, connect them with cell phones, renew identification cards and find them emergency medication and other services.
Timing is everything, Casupang said.
On one visit, a homeless person may be having a psychotic episode or be far gone on heroin or alcohol to respond. They’ve searched for a homeless sex worker who lives in a storm drain in Castaic. And they located man with cancer who lives deep behind the trees and bushes in the Sepulveda Basin.
Some people, the team says, just don’t want to be on the grid, preferring to be invisible to the government. But a week or two later, that same person may have had enough of street life, and wants something better, which is why consistent visits are important, Casupang noted.
Sometimes, the challenge is simply the good weather, she added. “People get used to living on the kindness of strangers,” she said, and the climate in Los Angeles is favorable, compared to most other cities.
Providing outreach to homeless people with mental health needs has come into more focus recently, especially with last year’s passage of Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax. It’s projected to raise $355 million a year for 10 years, dollars that officials hope will help bolster social services for homeless people, to help them transition into planned affordable housing, among other initiatives.
“We hope that the infusion of funds will increase the number of staff and range of services provided such as substance abuse counselors, registered nurses, etc,” Casupang said. “It would also help to have an increase of staff located in the clinics specializing in this population and equipped to work in the housing piece. We hope to see increased housing subsidies as well as units.”
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Vivian, 28, is handed supplies by Alexandria Britton, who was once homeless, as Teresa Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, of Department of Mental Health’s mobile triage team, fills out a survey on her at a homeless encampment along the Los Angeles River Greenway in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Joseph Robertson, Alexandria Britton and Teresa Rivera, of the Department of Mental Health mobile triage team, approach a homeless encampment along the Los Angeles River Greenway in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Joseph Robertson, a Department of Mental Health community worker, visits Robert at a homeless encampment along the Los Angeles River Greenway in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Joseph Robertson, a Department of Mental Health community worker, visits Robert at a homeless encampment along the Los Angeles River Greenway in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Teresa Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, and Alexandria Britton, both of the Department of Mental Health mobile triage team, attempt to help Steve, 49, with a doctor’s appointment after he asked for help while sleeping on a bench along Sherman Way in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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Department of Mental Health mobile triage team, Teresa Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, and Alexandria Britton, who was once homeless, search for homeless in Canoga Park on Monday, Feb. 5, 2018. The team provides outreach to homeless people with hopes of coaxing those with mental health needs to accept services and housing. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
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On a recent day, Rivera and teammates volunteer Alexandria Britton and community worker Joseph Robertson visited the last remnants of an encampment that ran alongside the Los Angeles River Greenway in Canoga Park.
Next, they searched for older women and mothers with children hiding in the public bathrooms at a recreation center.
They also drove to Sherman Way, to find a man named Steve, 49, asleep on a bench.
Asked if he needed food or water, Steve told them he felt pain on the right side of his face because of broken fragments of a plastic earbud stuck deep in the canal of his ear. They asked if he wanted them to make an appointment to a nearby clinic. He quietly nodded yes.
“We’re excited about that,” Rivera said later, because it meant Steve would get medical help, then likely linked to additional services.
But it’s not always so easy. Under state law, a homeless person with mental-health needs can’t be forced into psychiatric or medical care. Law-enforcement officials and social workers are often stopped by the current definition of the term “gravely disabled.”
The definition currently reads: “A condition in which a person, as a result of a mental disorder (rather than a chosen lifestyle or lack of funds) is unable to provide for his or her basic needs for food, clothing or shelter.”
In early February, L.A. County supervisors Kathryn Barger and Mark Ridley-Thomas led an effort to add the phrase “or medical treatment where the lack or failure of such treatment results in substantial physical harm or death” to the definition.
There are 37 other states that have language similar to what the county is proposing, Barger said. Opponents worry, however, that any change to the definition may encourage law enforcement and others to force people into institutions simply because they are deemed to be “different.”
Sandy Carson, 55, of Downey, is a member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, speaking on behalf of family members who want the wording changed.
Based on the current definition of gravely disabled, her homeless, 30-year-old son can’t be forced into care, even though he suffers from cysts that bleed. But because he has psychotic episodes, he doesn’t know he needs help, she said, even after he’s been beaten up on the street, and his shoes and food are stolen.
“They can’t acknowledge they need help,” she said of her son, Jason, and people like him. “When they are not mentally healthy, they cannot focus on health issues because they don’t even know (those issues) exist. They think they are absolutely fine in their perspective.”
Miss Chevron, and others like her, also doesn’t fit under the current definition of gravely disabled because she appears to be eating well, and isn’t a danger to herself or anyone else.
To a public growing impatient with homeless encampments, it may seem like outreach teams aren’t doing enough, Rivera acknowledged. But they do what they can with the resources they have, she added.
Rivera, Britton and Robertson said they won’t give up on Miss Chevron.
“She’s my favorite person, because she’s a challenge,” said Britton, a volunteer who was once herself homeless.
Rivera credits Britton for her patience and rapport with Miss Chevron.
A few times, the older woman has let her guard down. She once told Britton that because she has no teeth, the snacks the outreach team brings to her are too hard for her to eat. She also told Britton she’d prefer a pair of 501 Levi jeans. She’d like a size 0, she said.
“For us, that was a huge success,” Rivera said of that interaction. “It takes a lot of patience.”
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