Boom.
Ronda Deplazes had just gotten out of the shower and placed curlers in her long blond hair when she heard something slam against her front door.
Boom.
Outside, her son — a man who could fix anything, who loved his family, who never remembered these incidents but always apologized later — was yelling and swearing as he pulled large gray river rocks from the planter beds and hurled them at the front of his parents’ suburban Concord home.
Boom.
Deplazes heard a woman scream.
Later she learned her 38-year-old son had ripped a branch from a crepe myrtle in the front yard, leapt over a retaining wall and fallen onto the sidewalk. CalMatters is not naming Deplazes’ son, who lives with psychosis and addiction and could not be interviewed for this story.
Police arrived within minutes that August evening. They found Deplazes, hair still in rollers, in bed cuddling her shaking 17-year-old Labrador, Farley.
This was not the first time officers had visited the family’s home.
“What happened with CARE Court?” one officer asked.
Deplazes offered her assessment of a program she’d once seen as an answer to her prayers.
“They did nothing,” she said.
More than three years have passed since Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced the concept of CARE Court. Standing at a lectern in front of a San Jose treatment center in March 2022, he described a new court system that would steer hard-to-treat individuals down a pathway of housing and services. He called it “a completely new paradigm, a new approach, a different pathway.”
“I’ve got four kids,” he said that day. “I can’t imagine how hard this is …It breaks your heart. I mean, your life just torn asunder because you’re desperately trying to reach someone you love and you watch them suffer and you watch a system that consistently lets you down and lets them down.”
Family members of people with serious mental illnesses told CalMatters they breathed a sigh of relief that day. So many struggled for years to find help for loved ones who seemed to slip ever deeper into psychosis.
While disability rights advocates decried the program as a threat to the civil liberties of people with mental illness, and counties protested that they didn’t have the necessary resources or time, family members described feeling a twinge of something that had long eluded them: Hope.
Finally, they thought, someone heard them.
Finally, their loved ones would get help.
With the vocal support of many of these families, Newsom shepherded CARE Court through the Legislature. That October, he signed it into law. A year later, the program rolled out in an initial cohort, reaching the entire state by December 2024.
Now, many of the same family members who embraced CARE Court say it has fallen short of their expectations. In dozens of conversations with CalMatters, they described loved ones who continue to cycle between jail and homelessness. Some said their loved ones were dropped because they failed to participate in voluntary treatment plans. Others said counties had lost track of them entirely.
Some of the disappointment is a matter of scale. Newsom had initially projected that as many as 12,000 people could be eligible for the new program.
Two years of data from the state’s judicial council shows that, as of October, courts had received 3,092 petitions for CARE Court. Almost half were dismissed. Thus far, these petitions have translated into just 706 CARE plans and agreements.
County and state officials say it’s too soon to pass judgment on the program. They point to the uncounted individuals who received help without ever enrolling in the program, and to those who have made incremental progress, perhaps working with a substance use counselor for the first time. They also say buy-in from vulnerable people takes a long time to achieve, but that the voluntary nature of the program is essential for lasting recovery.
Some officials acknowledge a significant disconnect between what many families expected, and what the law actually prescribes.
In Contra Costa County, where Deplazes lives, Judge Melissa O’Connell said she meets with participants who tell her they now have stable housing or are preparing for their first job interview. Such accounts buoy her.
“That’s how I view CARE,” she said. “It is helping people that would not be helped if CARE did not exist. It’s not helping everyone. I get that.”
But many families who have spent years or decades begging for help have lost patience.
In Ronda Deplazes’ case, she’s going to war.
“That’s my mission,” she said. “We have to stop CARE Court.”
Years of desperation
Anosognosia.
It’s a word people struggle to pronounce, even as they describe how profoundly it has upended their loved ones’ lives. It means an inability or refusal to recognize a defect or disorder that is clinically evident.
Ronda Deplazes knows it as a Catch-22.
Her son is sick but doesn’t believe he’s sick. Who would voluntarily accept treatment for an illness they don’t think they have?
The conundrum dates to 1967, when California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short law. Prior to the law, it had been far too easy for family members to force loved ones into mental health treatment. Civil rights violations were rampant. Conditions in state hospitals were dismal.
The landmark law established strict criteria for involuntary treatment. It imposed specific timeframes for confinement and limited who could be subjected to holds: only people deemed a danger to themselves or others, or gravely disabled.
These civil rights protections are still widely considered imperative. But desperate family members say the law has at times made it difficult for them to get their loved ones life-saving treatment.
Many families pinned their newfound hope on Newsom’s initial comments, in which he said individuals who weren’t willing or able to follow through on their CARE plans might be moved “into a different category of care and support, more traditional along the lines of what we have today, through the (Lanterman-Petris-Short) conservatorship system.”
Several family members CalMatters interviewed interpreted that to mean CARE Court could compel their seriously mentally ill loved ones to get help.
“We get so pumped up with hope,” Deplazes said.
“I think the frustration and disappointment is more than a person can bear. That’s the truth of it. That is the bottom line,” she said.
In an interview with CalMatters, California Health and Human Services Undersecretary Corrin Buchanan said CARE Court was never intended to be another form of conservatorship. She emphasized what she considers unique facets of the program – families can directly petition the courts for help, county behavioral health departments face increased accountability and they are getting state support to develop the “three-legged stool” of treatment, medication and housing.
She said she’s heard from many families whose loved ones have benefited from the program, which can provide tools to meet the needs of “the right person, who’s the right fit for the model.”
Growing up, Deplazes’ son loved baseball, tinkering and spending time outside.
In retrospect, the first signs that something was wrong were the risky behaviors — leaping from the second story window onto the trampoline, doing donuts with his truck. By the time he was 19, he had received three DUIs. At one point, neighbors filed for a restraining order against him.
Deplazes, a preschool teacher who regularly volunteers through her church, and her husband, Roger, who runs a family solar electricity business, met in middle school and have been together since their teens. They tried everything they could think of to help their son. They paid to send him to a high-end rehabilitation center. Staff told them their son was hearing voices. Eventually, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition marked by symptoms of psychosis as well as mood disorders.
Deplazes was familiar with the implications of that diagnosis: Her mother, sister and brother had all suffered with similar illnesses. She and her husband found their son a psychiatrist. He thrived for a while, with professional help, a girlfriend and a part-time job.
Then, during the pandemic, Deplazes said her son went off his medication because he didn’t like the way it made him feel.
Things spiraled.
He lived with his parents until violence fueled by fentanyl use made the arrangement untenable.
In 2022, court records show, Deplazes filed for a temporary restraining order.
Her son started sleeping in strip malls near their home.
Inspired by Newsom
After hearing Newsom describe his plans for CARE Court, Deplazes felt inspired to participate in transforming the mental health system. She signed up for a class to help other families navigate mental illness.
In that class, she learned about Contra Costa County’s assisted outpatient treatment program — a court-ordered mental health treatment program that predated CARE Court. Upon her referral, he was accepted, she said; she hoped county mental health workers could convince him to participate in treatment.
One summer day in 2024, Deplazes pulled her car into the parking lot of an abandoned Dollar Tree where her son sometimes slept. She initially didn’t recognize the unconscious body surrounded by trash, grease caked into the neck, face and arms.
When she finally managed to shake her son awake, he was weak and trembling. She moved him to the shade and ran to get water, Gatorade and food.
She called the county behavioral health team.
“You have to help me,” she said.
County workers brought him food and water, she said, but her son wasn’t willing to accept additional help.
“‘Don’t worry,’” she remembers them saying. “‘In December you can apply for CARE Court.’”
Deplazes spent three days filling out paperwork ahead of CARE Court’s rollout in Contra Costa County. It was so complicated, she said, and required so much information that she eventually had to seek help: first from a volunteer from the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, then from staff at the local law library. But she got the petition submitted, and in late January, her son was approved.
High expectations, then disappointment
The first CARE Court hearing for Deplazes’ son was on the morning of Feb. 7 of this year. She and her husband arrived at the Martinez courthouse at the appointed time. Their son did not.
In the coming months, Deplazes continued to find him crumpled up in strip malls a few blocks from her home. She had to stop frequenting those shopping centers. It was too hard to see him like that.
Sometimes, in the cold and rain, he would appear on her doorstep barefoot and freezing. He might lie there for days, barely moving. She’d contact the CARE Court team to alert them to his location. On some occasions, she said, they came out and did their best to help him. But most times, he was gone before they arrived.
She cut back on work, spending hours each day on the phone.
He kept getting arrested. Police would drive him to the county jail in Richmond. Often, Deplazes said, they discharged him in the middle of the night and he would walk until he could borrow a phone to call home. Her husband, worried for their son’s safety, would drive 25 miles to pick him up. CARE Court workers often weren’t even aware he was behind bars, Deplazes said.
Deplazes and her husband stopped going anywhere, fearing a crisis would emerge in their absence.
“You can’t have a life when you have a kid like this,” Deplazes said.
By March, she was already convinced that CARE Court wasn’t going to save her son.
She started reaching out to everyone she could. The county behavioral health department. The public defender. The district attorney.
“Dear Secretary Welch,” she wrote in a March email to the deputy secretary of behavioral health at the California Health and Human Services Agency, “This is a desperate plea to save our son’s life as now we are being told that CARE Court is also 100% voluntary…my son is deteriorating rapidly and being arrested on a regular basis for extreme and escalating behaviors….Secretary Welch please let me know if this CARE Court petition is futile and I should go another route. We love our son. He is smart, sweet and worth saving. We will never give up on his recovery. Please send guidance before it is too late for our family.”
She followed up with a second email, but never heard back.
“I’m giving up,” she told a reporter one morning soon after. “Honestly, I’m giving up.”
Instead, she began begging the county to let her son out of CARE Court, reasoning that he would get more treatment through the criminal courts if he was not constrained by his participation in the program.
Welch, in an interview with CalMatters, offered a message to parents like Deplazes:
“We’re listening,” she said. “We’re trying to better understand how we can be helpful. There’s lots of tools in the toolbox and CARE wasn’t necessarily a panacea.”
‘It was my baby’
Not long into her CARE Court experience, Deplazes was introduced to a former police officer named Sam Figueroa. The two instantly bonded over their shared desperation.
During his 25-year career, Figueroa said he had specially trained to help people in mental distress. By his own estimation, he had placed thousands of people on involuntary holds.
In 2023, he said someone called to tell him they heard screaming from his son’s Los Angeles area apartment. Figueroa immediately flew south, arriving to find his son emaciated and lying in the bathtub in a urine-soaked sleeping bag. Feces and rotting food coated the apartment.
“I thought I was in a nightmare,” he said. “And it was my baby.”
His son had recently graduated magna cum laude from UC Santa Cruz. Now, doctors told Figueroa that the sooner he intervened, the more likely he was to save his son’s life.
Despite his years of experience, Figueroa couldn’t convince anyone to place his son on an involuntary hold. Not after the young man tried to break into someone’s home. Not after he jumped from a moving vehicle.
Like Deplazes, Figueroa had started out optimistic about CARE Court. Like her, he soon grew angry. The clock was ticking.
“Doctor says ‘He doesn’t know he’s sick, he needs treatment now.’ CARE Court says ‘He doesn’t know he’s sick, he has to volunteer,’” he said. “I don’t understand that language. And I barely got high school, but that sounds very stupid.”
Gigi Crowder, CEO of Contra Costa’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — an organization that represents family members — said she had initially felt hopeful about the new program. She remembers telling parents that CARE Court represented a new opportunity.
“We have failed this community of individuals,” she said recently. “We just have. We continue to do it when we offer false hope.”
By last summer, Deplazes had had enough.
One June morning, she came before Judge O’Connell, who oversees the county’s assisted outpatient program, conservatorship proceedings and CARE Court.
Deplazes’ health had deteriorated from the constant stress. Her son seemed to be getting worse.
Irate, she begged the judge to remove her son from CARE Court before he ended up dead.
“I said ‘let him out. I need to find him help and he’s not getting it here,’” she said.
In retrospect, Deplazes wishes she had been more tactful.
But, at that moment, she just didn’t care.
The hardest days
O’Connell is not oblivious to the pain of families like the Deplazes.
She and others in her courtroom are acutely aware that many have submitted petitions only after decades of heartache.
The hardest days are the ones when she has to tell family members that CARE Court is not going to help their loved ones.
“As a parent, when you feel like our systems have failed your loved one time and again, that can be devastating,” she said. “That’s never lost on us in CARE. But I know that doesn’t help make someone feel better about it.”
Prior to being sworn in on Jan. 8, 2024, O’Connell spent years working for the Northern California Innocence Project. A psychology major in college, she was excited to take on her new role.
About six or seven months into the county’s CARE Court rollout, she became concerned about the apparent disconnect between what the law described and what community members expected. She edited the county’s CARE Court webpage to better emphasize the program’s voluntary nature.
“I would never want to give someone false hope,” she said. “The only way you can try to avoid that is by being good at communicating and managing expectations.”
As of October, Contra Costa County had received 69 petitions for CARE Court, 28 of which had been filed by family members. Twenty-four of these petitions had since been dismissed, 11 led to CARE agreements with four more agreements pending. Seven individuals had exited the program to enter the Lanterman-Petris-Short conservatorship system, the county said.
Marie Scannell, Contra Costa County’s mental health program chief, and Elyse Perata, the mental health program manager, describe the challenges they’ve faced in rolling out CARE Court. Their staff members spend countless hours searching for hard-to-locate individuals, they said. They then make multiple visits over several months to gradually gain these individuals’ trust.
Then there are the families.
Perata, a therapist, said she empathizes with families frustrated that their loved ones can’t be compelled to participate. But she also emphasized the importance of a client’s buy-in in order to achieve “longstanding success.”
She and Scannell described the dedication of their staff, and the warmth of O’Connell’s courtroom – where participants are greeted with snacks and support.
For some people in the community, they said, the program has worked well.
One 31-year-old man, who asked that his name not be used for privacy reasons, told CalMatters he had participated in the county’s CARE Court program for several months. Prior to that, his father had referred him to a mental health treatment facility after he went off his medication, fell into psychosis and poured water into his gas tank, ruining his car.
He appreciates the help he’s received connecting with job training, as well as the program’s more intangible aspects – moral support, reassurance, a positive outlook.
“I didn’t expect it to be this life-changing,” he said.
After CARE Court
In July, Deplazes’ son was released from CARE Court. Deplazes said the judge told her it was because the CARE Court team couldn’t locate him.
In August, on the evening he was found throwing river rocks at the front door, police arrested him for repeatedly violating his parents’ restraining order, Deplazes said.
In September, she said, a criminal court judge ordered her son placed in 180 days of inpatient treatment, along with domestic violence classes and antipsychotic medications.
“My son, we finally got him criminalized,” Deplazes informed her friend, Figueroa, as the two sat together on the leather couches in her living room.
“God bless,” he said.
Figueroa remained worried about his son. He had brought him back north and put him up in a nearby hotel for nine months, he said, until the young man was kicked out for frightening the staff.
Homeless, his son had wandered into a neighboring county. His county responded by closing his son’s CARE Court case, he said.
Now, Figueroa was trying to track his son’s Instagram posts to make sure he was still alive.
In the meantime, the days of the involuntary hold the judge had ordered for Deplazes’ son were slipping away. She was still desperately trying to find a long-term placement her son would be willing to accept. She knew he longed for his freedom.
“And there’s no talking to him,” she said. “Because remember again, in his mind, he’s not sick.”
The two talked briefly about a new law that will take effect this January. It promises to expand the grave disability standard as laid out by the Lanterman-Petris-Short law. Many families hope it will open a new pathway to conservatorship.
“But again, it’s a law,” Deplazes said.
Implementation, she said, was another question entirely.
This project story was produced jointly by CalMatters & CatchLight as part of our mental health initiative.
