For the twelve months leading up to California’s March 5th primary I’ve been trying to understand why the state’s behavioral health safety net hasn’t done more to alleviate mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse.
Today, Californians vote on a plan by the governor and legislature to revise the safety net system. If ratified, Proposition 1 would partially change how California’s 58 counties deliver behavioral health services. It would also authorize a bond to build new treatment facilities and housing for the homeless. Rejection would not change how counties do things, and there would be no bond to build new treatment facilities or housing.
A pre-election story I wrote for MindSiteNews.org addresses why, despite 75 years of well-intended efforts, shocking numbers of people are still dying from overdoses, sleeping in vehicles or on sidewalks, or wandering barefoot while muttering unintelligibly
Titled, “Can Prop. 1 Address California’s Trifecta of Mental Health Crises? Voters Are About to Decide,” the story targets the most difficult and under appreciated of journalism’s five W’s – why.
Who, what, when, and where are answered by discoverable facts. Revealing facts, especially if they’ve been hidden, has the potential to shock the public conscience into action, or at least that used to be the case.
Understanding why public policies fail to ameliorate obvious social ills is as difficult if not more so than investigative journalism. It requires journalists to make judgments about which factors contribute to complex problems and in what proportions. Persuading the public to accept such judgments depends on a level of trust that may not be present.
Asking why leads to journalism’s even more complex stepchild, how to fix things. Asking how forces new judgments about choices whose difficulties are complicated by the self-interests of decision-makers.
My story tiptoes through the minefield of why and how by asking six experts with different perspectives to give their take on the problems and remedies bound up in Prop 1. It leaves readers to draw their own inferences.
Such an approach, a combination of concatenation and juxtaposition, strikes me as more useful for drawing attention to policy stories than the traditional narrative that weaves facts into a tapestry of understanding. The medium is the message. Every time you read or rather skim a story on a device that fits in your palm, the message you send writers and editors is that if you don’t find something interesting quickly, your twitchy thumb is going to swipe left and take your eyeballs elsewhere.
The format of this story is derived from an overly ambitious proposal to convince news organizations to put together many articles, like pieces of a complex public policy puzzle, to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
That proposal also suggested making a virtue of the likelihood that the first and best audience for a pool of policy stories would be the influential behavioral health insiders and service providers who administered and spent $16.7 billion in FY 2021-2022, and probably more this fiscal year. I imagined these stakeholders as the dynamo of a social media engine, extracting and circulating tidbits of journalism to empower activists and advocates in their networks to mobilize different interest groups within the general public, each demanding what they want from the behavioral health safety net. In theory this social media infused marketplace of ideas would create a better informed citizenry in the service of democracy.
Alas, none of this high-falutin stuff came to pass which makes me all the more grateful to Rob Waters of MindSiteNews.org who edited this Rashomon-like story and gave it an online home aimed at the perfect target audience.
To get up to speed, I relied heavily on articles by many journalists, notably at CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times. I hope the MindSite story returns the favor such as when one expert outlines California’s first-in-the nation pilot project to test whether hooking up soon-to-be-released prison inmates with Medi-Cal could improve their long term health outcomes; or localizing a story about how to preserve and perhaps create housing for people trying to recover from mental illness. This would involve increasing the $44 dollars a day that nonprofit board and care homes now get to care for a mentally ill human being. Kennels may charge pet owners more than that to feed, keep safe, and perhaps walk their four-legged loved ones.
Failing yielded suggestions for future efforts. After listening to my scheme, one journalism professor said it sounded like an attempt to create a new type of civic machinery to help to solve public problems. That almost sounds grant-fundable. He also pointed me to collaborative and cooperative journalism projects of which I had been unaware, and suggested that I join the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) to find like-minded people.
Special thanks to the retired dean of journalism who listened to my idea when it was in its infancy. He said it had merit, but thought I needed more time to pull off a project conceived in October that was designed to end on the day of the primary election.
The dean was completely right but I was not entirely wrong to follow the Silicon Valley adage, launch before you are ready. I blew Collaboration 101 by mapping out a plan then asking people to join. My granddaughters taught me better. One would propose a game. A second would join while adding some permutation having nothing to do with the first. By the time the third girl came in they were having fun doing something unrecognizable.
Now the MindSite story is encouraging readers to ask “why” even as the “how” thinking begins on March 6th whether the initiative’s failure necessitates tweaking the current system, or its passage requires the implementation of the newly ratified law’s intent.
Either way the devil will be in the details. Journalism has got to get into the game.