There are an estimated 11.5 million Americans (or nearly 5 percent of the population) living with a serious mental illness. Many families struggle to get care for their loved ones, describing an inhumane system that treats mental illness and the often-concomitant problem of substance use disorder as different than other disabilities.
For years, Kartar Diamond struggled to find care for her son due to a lack of quality residential housing programs in California, expensive monthly rates, and long waiting lists at both public and private long-term psychiatric facilities.
Now 35, he lives in a residential housing program in Orange County for people with severe mental illnesses.
California is one of just five states in which the rate of death from drug overdoses is higher in rural areas than urban ones.
But across the state, emergency responders are finding solutions tailored to their communities. Driven by a desire to help patients find long-term help, emergency providers are partnering with local organizations and equip communities to distribute medication.
Founded more than 20 years ago, Street Level Health Project started with a handful of nurses and volunteers visiting day laborer sites in East Oakland to provide medical assistance and other resources to newly arrived immigrants.
Volunteer nurses also noticed signs of hunger among the men, with some going days without eating a proper meal.
About 5,000 San Diego-area residents were impacted by the historic downpour last January that led to dramatic flooding.
Extreme flooding events are becoming more common as the climate warms. But some residents impacted by the disaster insist there is another force that exacerbated the flooding: Decades of government neglect and indifference toward San Diego’s lower income neighborhoods.
Two years ago, California voters overwhelmingly decided to enshrine the right to abortion services in the state constitution. And it wasn’t just coastal liberals: voters in the rural north, Central Valley, and Sierra Nevada all voted in favor of the proposition, despite also voting largely for Republican offices.
But many of these residents still lack access and have yet to implement effective solutions.
Even in California, a state where voters overwhelmingly decided to protect the right to reproductive freedom in the constitution this November, many rural residents struggle to access abortion services.
These residents sometimes live hundreds of miles away from the nearest abortion clinic and lack the resources to trek to another part of the state.
Across California, midwives and doulas are working to increase access to their services to more Black and brown women. Organizations are also raising awareness about the options people have to welcome a child into the world.
Some “women of color are unaware that there’s another way to be in your pregnancy, labor and birth, and postpartum than what’s generally done and prescribed,” said Laura Perez, who works in San Francisco. “You can’t have access to something if you don’t know it exists.”
Network directories — lists of providers contracted with health plans — form the heart of decision-making for health care consumers. They can help people decide which health plan to choose if they want to stay with a trusted doctor.
But health care providers say insurers have shifted the burden of updating directories onto them — a patchwork system that is still riddled with errors and leaves consumers paying the price.
California is close to revising a rule that excludes family caregivers from unemployment.
If signed into law, the bill is expected to extend unemployment eligibility to more than 119,000 family caregivers, who are primarily low-income women of color, according to a home care workers union. Supporters say that’s only fair, given that people employed as in-home caregivers who are not family members do receive unemployment benefits.