Forty years later, legacy of Arnold v. Sarn lives on
Blog October 29, 2021 0

Forty years later, legacy of Arnold v. Sarn lives on

With the goal of helping the very sickest people with mental illness, Josh Mozell has taken on Chick Arnold’s caseload — and his cause.

Chick Arnold, lead plaintiff in the Arnold v. Sarn class action lawsuit that claimed Maricopa County and the state of Arizona were failing people with serious mental illness, is shown at his Phoenix home on April 12, 2021. Photo by Brandon Quester | AZCIR

ACMI members are working to help spread stories to the public about our behavioral health system of care. Amy Silverman of Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is doing a series of stories highlighting Arizona’s behavioral health history and ongoing issues.

by Amy Silverman

by Amy Silverman October 20, 2021

Forty years later, legacy of Arnold v. Sarn lives on

Chick Arnold pulls out an old scrapbook packed with newspaper clippings, just in case he forgets anything.

At 74, Arnold has a shock of white hair and a sparkle reminiscent of Steve Martin. Tucked up against the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, his home is cheerful and modern, with a courtyard, high ceilings and brightly colored artwork that pops in the light of this warm spring morning. Arnold’s disposition is similarly sunny, even though he’s spent his career trying to help people whose lives are very dark. 

As he talks, the scrapbook unopened in his lap, it’s clear that Arnold remembers just about every detail of the last 40 years—particularly when it comes to his role as godfather of the state’s mental health care system. 

In 1981, Charles “Chick” Arnold was a young attorney working as Maricopa County’s public fiduciary, assigned to be the guardian for 600 vulnerable adults—the elderly, as well as people with serious mental illness and developmental disabilities. Arnold had a sister with a significant developmental disability and grew up knowing enough about the systems designed to protect these populations to understand that change was needed.

Mental illness—particularly the most chronic and severe cases—is difficult to treat. Matters of the brain have always been confounding, and often dismissed. For the most part, early societies treated mental illness as something other than medical. They looked for spiritual reasons, demons. Despite some scientific advances, to this day, treating mental illness is more art than science; doctors aren’t always sure why a medication works, and a diagnosis can change based on ephemeral elements like behavior. 

In the 1960s and 70s, the combination of media and government attention to both the dangers of institutionalization and the advances in the development of psychotropic drugs meant that it was no longer a given that a person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder would live out their years at a locked institution like the Arizona State Hospital. 

A state law was passed in 1970 requiring that only those who present a danger to themselves or others be housed at ASH, a collection of somewhat majestic-looking old buildings ringed by chain link and razor wire on Van Buren and 24th streets in the middle of Phoenix. The population dropped from 2,000 to 300 in less than a year as patients were released to the street, sometimes with little more than a bus pass and a month’s worth of medication.

Deinstitutionalization was a great idea that was not particularly well-executed in many places in the United States. Arizona was no exception. Out in the community, there was basically no case management system, no counseling, no housing program, no assistance with employment, no peer support.

In the late 1970s, Arnold and others successfully lobbied the legislature to pass a bill that, in essence, requires the state to provide these services to people with serious mental illness, with no cap on the cost. This was huge, particularly in a penny-pinching, libertarian state like Arizona. 

But change was slow. Then a man named John Goss dropped by to see Arnold. 

As Arnold describes him, Goss, who was in his early 40s, was a smart man, a former stockbroker from New York who’d had a mental breakdown and made his way to the Southwest, where he’d previously been a patient at the Arizona State Hospital. One of Arnold’s charges, he was now living in an unlicensed boarding home that was in terrible condition; it had burned down more than once. Goss walked the city, often stopping at Arnold’s office in the old courthouse in downtown Phoenix to say hello. 

On this particular visit, Goss told Arnold he’d read about the new law, and wanted to know why things hadn’t gotten better for him.  

“He nailed me,” Arnold recalls. 

So Arnold turned to the judicial branch of government, becoming the lead plaintiff in one of the state’s longest-running class action lawsuits and a household name in mental health circles. 

(The Sarn in Arnold v. Sarn is James Sarn, then the head of the state’s Department of Health Services.)

The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the case, but the branches of government continued to tangle for decades, as a court monitor conducted annual audits, documenting deficiencies and calling on the court to compel government to fix them. In 2012, with the state in financial crisis following the Great Recession, the court monitor and much of the program was suspended, replaced in 2014 with an agreement that ended the litigation and established guidelines for providing services. 

“Looking back on it, I think we were not enough. The constructs that were intended to be created, the housing opportunities, employment opportunities, the kind of respect piece that had been lacking from our system is still compromised. You know, dignity, respect, or honor serving people with disabilities in a non-patronizing way.”

CHICK ARNOLD

Will Humble was the director of the Arizona Department of Health Services at the time. He recalls advising then-Gov. Jan Brewer. 

“I told Brewer’s team, ‘Look, we can’t go anywhere with a court monitor,’” Humble says. “We’re in a horrible recession. We concede that we’re not going to get all needs met. We’re just going to keep the wheels on state government the best we can.’” 

It was a tough situation. During her time in the state legislature in the 1980s and 90s, Brewer was a champion of rights and better services for people with mental illness. She had a son who spent many years at the state hospital. As governor, she supported a Medicaid expansion that benefited people with SMI (serious mental illness), but she was criticized for dropping her focus on the mental health system. She gets mixed reviews for the decision to settle Arnold v. Sarn.

“They still could use a lot of help today, but we feel very accomplished by what we were able to accomplish,” Brewer told AZCIR this spring. 

“I just know that I worked really hard and I gave it all I could and I saved it. I saved the day and I believe that and I am proud of that.”

Arnold signed off on the settlement agreement. Now, he regrets not pushing harder. 

“Looking back on it, I think we were not enough,” he says. “The constructs that were intended to be created, the housing opportunities, employment opportunities, the kind of respect piece that had been lacking from our system is still compromised. You know, dignity, respect, or honor serving people with disabilities in a non-patronizing way.”

Will Humble was the director of the Arizona Department of Health Services at the time. He recalls advising then-Gov. Jan Brewer. 

“I told Brewer’s team, ‘Look, we can’t go anywhere with a court monitor,’” Humble says. “We’re in a horrible recession. We concede that we’re not going to get all needs met. We’re just going to keep the wheels on state government the best we can.’” 

It was a tough situation. During her time in the state legislature in the 1980s and 90s, Brewer was a champion of rights and better services for people with mental illness. She had a son who spent many years at the state hospital. As governor, she supported a Medicaid expansion that benefited people with SMI (serious mental illness), but she was criticized for dropping her focus on the mental health system. She gets mixed reviews for the decision to settle Arnold v. Sarn.

“They still could use a lot of help today, but we feel very accomplished by what we were able to accomplish,” Brewer told AZCIR this spring. 

“I just know that I worked really hard and I gave it all I could and I saved it. I saved the day and I believe that and I am proud of that.”

Arnold signed off on the settlement agreement. Now, he regrets not pushing harder. 

“Looking back on it, I think we were not enough,” he says. “The constructs that were intended to be created, the housing opportunities, employment opportunities, the kind of respect piece that had been lacking from our system is still compromised. You know, dignity, respect, or honor serving people with disabilities in a non-patronizing way.”

Attorney Josh Mozell sits for a portrait in his office’s conference room in Phoenix on June 23, 2021. (Photo by Alberto Mariani)

Chick Arnold retired at the end of 2020. He says that would not have been possible if not for Josh Mozell, a young attorney who took on Arnold’s caseload—and his cause. Like Arnold, Mozell believes the mental health care system has failed the state’s most vulnerable. As a caseworker for several years before attending law school, Mozell worked directly with people with chronic mental illness. He understands the system’s shortcomings from the inside. 

Mozell, 38, also wants to change the system. He is president of the board of a local non-profit called the Association for the Chronically Mentally Ill (ACMI), whose members push for legislative remedies and other reforms. He sits on an independent oversight committee that monitors conditions for people with serious mental illness in central Arizona. Mozell has the ears of agency heads, hospital directors and police chiefs, and this fall, a joint legislative committee will convene to address shortcomings at the Arizona State Hospital, thanks to Mozell’s lobbying efforts at the state capitol. 

Like Arnold before him, Mozell represents hospital companies and other providers, something that gives him a paycheck as well as insight into how the system works and access to decision makers. 

It’s about all of that, for sure, but there’s something else that makes these men so effective. 

When Chick Arnold walks into a room of policymakers, Mozell says, people fear him—but they want to give him a hug. It’s part of his magic. 

For Mozell, it’s understanding the system in ways few do. The younger lawyer spends a great deal of time with clients who are in crisis. 

On a muggy Friday morning in August, Mozell perches on the edge of a couch in a room at a central Phoenix extended-stay hotel, laptop open. Next to him, Rob Niebuhr shifts his tall frame to get comfortable, casual in a black tee shirt, shorts and Adidas in contrast with the lawyer’s dress clothes. 

Robert Niebuhr meets with attorney Josh Mozell in August 2021 to discuss Niebuhr’s living arrangements and how to get 

Just out of jail, Niebuhr’s wearing an ankle bracelet. He has schizophrenia, and was given a two-year sentence for chasing his stepfather with a dinner knife during a psychotic episode in 2017. The incident ended when Phoenix police shot Niebuhr.

Years later, Tarrill Kertesz sobs as she recalls her son’s shooting. She had called 911 during some of Rob’s previous outbursts when the family lived in Washington State and says the police had helped calm him down. This time was different.

“They shot him in front of me. And I was screaming that we called for help, not for you to shoot him.”

Police reported that Niebuhr came at them with the knife. Niebuhr was shot twice in the back and once in the arm and leg. As soon as he was well enough, hospital staff extubated him in the middle of the night and sent him to jail.

Kertesz found Holly Gieszl, a defense attorney who often represents people with mental illness. Gieszl represented Rob in his criminal case, alongside a public defender. “I don’t know what we would have done without Holly,” she says.

Holly Gieszl poses for a portrait at a Phoenix law firm on June 23, 2021. Photo by Alberto Mariani | AZCIR

Weeks before her son was to be released, Kertesz says she began asking jail officials about the formal plan to transition Niebuhr to the community. The shooting happened in Phoenix and while she’s since moved to Yuma, Kertesz and her husband love Niebuhr and want him nearby; but the court says they can’t see each other. 

When Niebuhr was released, she brought him clothes and a cell phone. They let Kertesz hug her son, she says, “and that was it.”

Niebuhr and Kertesz stayed in touch. 

Within days of Niebuhr’s release, there was trouble. Despite his mother’s pleas, she says there was no workable transition plan. Niebuhr was placed at a setting that has housed sex offenders, Kertesz says, because there was no other place for him. Niebuhr explains that he was quickly kicked out for fighting and bounced to a couple other places before landing at this hotel, which his mother had been paying for. Desperate and running out of money, Kertesz called Gieszl, who contacted Mozell.

Sitting in the small motel room, Mozell sounds more like a case manager than a lawyer as he asks Niebuhr if he knows why he hasn’t been given a place to live (no), how he’s feeling (good) and if he has his meds (yes). Niebuhr is frustrated because he was supposed to be picked up earlier that morning and taken to a mental health clinic to see a counselor. He stood outside at 7:30 a.m., he says, but no one came.

Mozell nods and keeps taking notes. 

Niebuhr starts talking about his phone, which is broken, and pretty quickly it’s clear that he’s not entirely well. The phone was sending him codes, he says. Now he has to get those messages through the television in his room.

The lawyer returns to his office and makes some calls.

Weeks later, Kertesz reports that the system has found her son a safe place to live and he’s being assigned to an ACT team, a high-impact case management plan for people with significant needs. He’s getting food baskets, peer support and someone’s supervising his medication—all of which should have happened automatically if the system was working, Mozell says.

Later in September, Gieszl and Mozell report that Niebuhr is struggling again. 

“It’s up and down,” Gieszl says.  

Mozell acknowledges that he rarely encounters a mental health crisis that is not brought to him by a family member. That haunts him, and reminds him of his time working in the system.

“Everybody on my caseload was alone,” he says. “They had either left their families or their families left them. That is the reality—this group does not have access to any kind of power.”

Josh Mozell estimates that he’s able to help a few dozen people with chronic mental illness a year. There are only so many hours in the day, and not everyone can afford to hire a private lawyer. (Mozell and Gieszl do take some pro bono cases, but they can’t afford to represent everyone at no cost.) That’s where the Association for the Chronically Mentally Ill comes in. The board of directors includes several people who fought for years to get help for their family members with chronic mental illness, as well as Mozell and Gieszl.

Founding member Deborah Geesling describes how she first got involved in the system, through her son. 

As a boy, he loved to do tricks on BMX bikes and play guitar like his older brother. But when Geesling’s son turned 14, something changed.

At first, Geesling says, her son was really anxious. He ran away from their Gilbert home several times. The third of four boys, he told his little brother the record albums hanging on his bedroom wall were whispering to him. He hit his father. The police came.

The young man wore handcuffs and a jumpsuit to his first visit with a psychiatrist. The doctor prescribed pills.  

“I just remember driving away from that appointment feeling relieved, like we really got something to start with,” Geesling says. 

She was right about one thing—it was only the beginning. 

“I called up the next morning to check on him and the person who answered the phone said, ‘That’s your son? He’s a psychopath.’ And he kind of laughed. He said, ‘Give him the number to the homeless shelter and pack his bags.’”

DEBORAH GEESLING

Geesling’s son had his first psychotic episode at 18. He had stopped taking his meds, wasn’t sleeping, sat at his brother’s drum set, hitting one drum over and over. And then it got worse. He landed at a psychiatric evaluation center in Phoenix. 

“I called up the next morning to check on him and the person who answered the phone said, ‘That’s your son? He’s a psychopath.’ And he kind of laughed. He said, ‘Give him the number to the homeless shelter and pack his bags,’” Geesling says.

“After that phone call, I was on the floor. I literally dropped to my knees. I was crying. I was just, I felt like I was in this pit, like, ‘Okay, what do I do with this?’”

In the end, her son was admitted to a psychiatric facility, where he stayed for three months. The following year, he was hospitalized four times. The doctors told Geesling he was one of the sickest people they’d ever seen. He believed Geesling was practicing witchcraft on him. Her youngest son says he slept at friends’ houses as much as he could, terrified to be near his older brother. 

But pretty much as soon as hospital staff learned her son lived at home, Geesling says, they’d try to release him every time. 

“How about you take him home,” she recalls thinking, “and then you tell me if you think he’s fine.” 

It took years, constant attention and the painful decisions both to seek guardianship and to announce that he had no place to live so he could qualify for housing, but today Geesling’s son is stable and living in an apartment. 

Lately, Geesling has been taking a call a day from someone else whose child, spouse or sibling is in crisis. 

Other ACMI board members take calls as well—and have their own stories to tell. Laurie and Chuck Goldstein charted the costs to private and public insurance companies over many years as the system struggled to finally get their son proper care. Barbara Honiberg’s son was hospitalized 50 times in a decade. Dick Dunseath’s son sometimes walks or even jumps into traffic. He’s been hit twice by cars. 

ACMI is not without controversy. The group is filled with hard chargers who don’t mind making enemies. Like Mozell, they are concerned about pretty much every aspect of the state’s mental health system, but their focus is often on what they see as the need for locked residential treatment facilities for those who are not sick enough to be in the state hospital, but not well enough to come and go as they please. 

Earlier this year, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University released a report about housing for people with chronic mental illness sponsored by ACMI and funded in part by the Goldsteins’ philanthropic foundation. The study found it’s far less expensive to provide housing for people with mental illness than to let them live on the street where they place a burden on the health care and criminal justice systems.

For the most part, ACMI’S focus has been the Arizona Legislature. They’ve had some success. In 2019, the governor signed a controversial bill appropriating money for the purchase of land and construction of a secure residential facility, creating a new level of care for Arizonans with mental illness who are not sick enough for the state hospital but too sick to live on their own. Funding for the project is $3.5 million. 

That law also created a formal definition of chronic mental illness. 

The 2021 legislative session proved fruitful as well for ACMI, which backed several bills, some of which were successful.

ACMI stopped short of convincing the legislature to lift the bed limit at the state hospital, but did get a law signed that is designed to increase accountability by improving audio and video surveillance at the state hospital. And while the group was unsuccessful in its push to sunset the state’s Psychiatric Review Board, which determines whether a person deemed guilty but insane should be released from the state hospital, a law was passed that is meant to increase accountability by standardizing medical reports used in the decision-making process. 

Other successful ACMI-backed legislation included a law that creates a transition program for people with mental illness reentering the community from prison and one that addresses the process of court-ordered evaluations for people with serious mental illness.

ACMI members’ viewpoints aren’t always shared by other mental health advocates. 

Eddie Sissons worked in various roles in and around Arizona’s mental health system for decades. Like some other advocates, Sissons opposed the legislation that funded the secure residential treatment facility. She wants to see the system take a more “holistic” approach that focuses on peer and family training, as well as facilities that are not locked but offer 24 hour care, such as a longtime program run by the Foundation for Senior Living.

“They have a point,” she says of ACMI. “But it’s not just to rush out with a fire truck. How do we back it up so we’re doing fire prevention so we don’t have the need to go to ASH, to go to secure residential and that I think is a bigger, harder, more difficult discussion to have.”

Sissons does agree with Mozell and others that the mental health system in Arizona continues to falter. 

“I don’t have a magic answer,” she says. “I wish I did.”

Rachel Gold contributed reporting to this article.

A place that should know better
Blog October 22, 2021 0

A place that should know better

ACMI members are working to help tell the story to the public about our behavioral health system of care.

Charles “Chick” Arnold, lead plaintiff in the Arnold v. Sarn class action lawsuit that claimed Maricopa County and the state of Arizona were failing people with serious mental illness, is shown at his Phoenix home on April 12, 2021. Photo by Brandon Quester | AZCIR

Arnold v. Sarn, a class action lawsuit that called for services for people with serious mental illness regardless of cost, celebrates its fortieth birthday this year. The litigation ended in 2014 with a settlement agreement that largely replaced “shall” with “may,” encouraging the system to try its best while softening requirements, and permanently doing away with a court monitor—the last remnant of robust accountability that had been in place for decades. Now Charles “Chick” Arnold, the lead plaintiff, says the agreement should have been more aggressive.

by Amy Silverman

by Amy Silverman October 19, 2021

Crisis in mental health care: A place that should know better (azcir.org)

In July 2017, a man in khaki shorts and a blue pullover walked through an empty office at a center for LGBTQ youth in Phoenix with a red can, pouring gasoline on the floor as he left the building. Immediately, flames erupted then engulfed the room.  

Darren William Beach Jr. later said his grandmother told him the building was killing her. She had passed away five years earlier.  

Two days before the fire, Beach had been evaluated for treatment for mental illness at a local psychiatric facility after he’d been pulled three times from a canal. The hallucinations, he claimed, were demanding he take his own life. The facility released him to the street.

After a year in jail following the fire, Beach went to live with his half-sister, Sommer Walter, and her family, including two small boys. Walter didn’t feel like she had an option. “They were going to release a mentally ill man who had just burned a building down to the streets,” she says. 

A week later, Beach was still waiting to be assigned a case management team to help him find housing and manage his medications when he began telling Walter he was a debt collector for the Hell’s Angels. They argued when he threw a cell phone, and Beach left. 

Days later, Walter got a call from a nurse at a local hospital. “They said Darren had been found in the middle of Encanto Park, passed out.” 

He’d taken a large dose of lithium, tested positive for meth and there was blue paint on his face, apparently from eating or huffing it, Walter says. 

Beach bounced among “residential treatments, substance abuse programs, halfway houses/shelters that myself and my family had to pay for and mobile shelters, where he’d sleep at a new church every night,” Walter explains. “Sometimes he’d even just be left to the streets.” 

He was hospitalized a total of 16 times in 18 months. When he stayed at her house, Walter says she found weapons in his backpack—brass knuckles, box cutters, a broken off baseball bat. 

Darren Beach is shown in an undated photo taken while in police custody after he failed to appear for a court date in Arizona. Photo courtesy Sommer Walter.
In this collage of images, Darren Beach is shown at different points throughout his life. Photo courtesy Sommer Walter.

“I would find pieces of glass…with some kind of cloth around one end of it,” Walter says. When she asked Beach what it was for, he answered, “In case I need to shank somebody.” 

She began to worry that “somebody” could be a member of her family after a conversation with Beach during one of his hospitalizations in 2020. 

“He told me, `If you don’t let me out of here, I’m going to burn your house down with you and your kids in it.’” 

Arizona’s mental health care system is failing Darren Beach and others like him, despite its reputation as a national model after a history-making class action lawsuit prompted decades of reform. 

The state spends billions of taxpayer dollars to comply with a law mandating care for adults with mental illness, enforced by a decision from the Arizona Supreme Court.

And yet, the majority of people with serious mental illness in Maricopa County and the state of Arizona are still not getting the help they need. While an estimated 35% of people with serious mental illness receive services nationally, that figure is 25% for Maricopa County. It’s even lower for Arizona, at 18%. 

Arnold v. Sarn celebrates its fortieth birthday this year. The litigation ended in 2014 with a settlement agreement that largely replaced “shall” with “may,” encouraging the system to try its best while softening requirements, and permanently doing away with a court monitor—the last remnant of robust accountability that had been in place for decades. 

Now Charles “Chick” Arnold, the lead plaintiff, says the agreement should have been more aggressive.  

A months-long investigation by AZCIR reveals that despite decades of reforms, Arizona continues to fail some of its very sickest. Interviews with more than two dozen people with serious mental illness and family members, as well as state officials, lawmakers, program administrators, doctors, law enforcement personnel, academics, historians, advocates and lawyers, and a review of thousands of pages of incident reports, grievances, court records, police reports and state records uncovered significant deficiencies in several key parts of Arizona’s mental health system. 

Even when they have qualified for services, people in crisis are not always getting the help they need from high impact case management teams and are often not kept in a psychiatric hospital long enough to recover and be successful. Patients at the state mental hospital complain of poor treatment and retaliation by staff when grievances are aired. For those in the community, employment figures are low and housing is scarce. Some of the sickest people live in unlicensed boarding homes with dangerous conditions and a lack of supervision.

With few reliable statistics and no annual court monitor audits to shed light on if or how the system is working, the public is exposed only to occasional news reports when things go terribly wrong. Largely untold are the stories of some of the sickest people with mental illness and their families—the man released from prison to a home with sex offenders, the state hospital patient who has been in seclusion for 15 months, the college professor thrown in jail because he thought his neighbor’s dog was possessed, the 39-year-old man who hit his 93-year-old female housemate over the head with a heavy metal object during a psychotic episode, the family whose adult son was hospitalized 50 times in a decade.

Public records reveal more, including how unlicensed boarding homes, considered by some to be a thing of the past, are still housing people with serious mental illness, and that the state hospital is plagued by allegations of retaliation for those who complain about poor treatment.

All of this in a place that should know better.

Chick Arnold says that both transparency and accountability have slipped in the years since the settlement agreement was signed. The court monitor in Arnold v. Sarn pumped a healthy dose of fear into the mental health system with the risk of getting called into court if services were not adequate. Today, little remains beyond a series of annual reports designed to measure performance in the areas of case management, housing, employment, peer support and family support. 

Much of the available data that measures the system’s performance focuses on services in Maricopa County, since Chick Arnold sued both the state and county in his 1981 lawsuit.

The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), which runs the state’s behavioral health system, contracts with an outside company to generate reports on the county’s progress. The most recent Quality Service Review was released in 2020. Experts say the methodology is questionable.

The sample of members used in the report to draw sweeping conclusions about the quality of mental health services for an SMI population exceeding 35,000 in Maricopa County was just 107, well below the 135 members researchers initially wanted to ensure the findings were reliable.

In addition, 9 out of 10 people with serious mental illness either could not  be reached or declined to be part of the survey, likely leaving out the sickest people—those in crisis and those whom the system can no longer find. 

Even so, many of the report’s conclusions are troubling.

According to the Quality Service Review, 10 percent of Maricopa County residents in the mental health system did not have an Individualized Service Plan (ISP), the document to guide their care, and only 57 percent actually included objectives that “addressed members’ needs.” Researchers also reported that some ISP goals were not personalized and that it appeared that some might have been copied from other ISP reports.

In addition, in 2020, only 18 percent of people with SMI were employed. A quarter of all members expressed that they did not have enough contact with their case manager. Almost 1 in 3 said they wanted more of a service they were currently receiving. And many indicated that they were unaware of service options.

Those figures are supposed to reflect the general population of people with SMI in Maricopa County.

The state does not release data that targets the people in the behavioral health system who are the sickest, the chronically mentally ill who make up close to 20 percent of the overall number of people with mental illness, according to a 2021 study by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. 

This population—several thousand people in Maricopa County alone—often cycles in and out of psychiatric hospitals, jails and homeless shelters, often getting sicker and sicker without the right treatment, as mental illnesses like schizophrenia deteriorate one’s health with every psychotic episode. 

Before the Arnold v. Sarn lawsuit, there was no case management system at all—so things have improved. But Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) Teams, designed to protect the highest needs clients by providing additional oversight for housing, medications and other needs, are not always getting the job done.

In 2019, only 29 of the 100 highest need clients were assigned to ACT Teams. 

Turnover rates for ACT Teams, which rely on continuity to provide the best help, have been as high as 150%.  

Today, a relatively small number of patients are under lock and key at the Arizona State Hospital (ASH). Even those who believe more beds should be available to serve the sickest patients agree that conditions must improve. 

Incident reports from ASH read like scenes out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” with staff documenting patients masturbating in public spaces, spitting at, hitting and chasing staff and punching other patients. Patient grievances are almost never substantiated and so many individuals have complained about retaliation after filing complaints that the Arizona Center for Disability Law is looking into the claims. The center sued in 2018 to get access to the hospital, even though it’s got a federal contract to monitor conditions there. 

Arizona Department of Health Services spokesman Steve Elliott denied AZCIR’s request for a tour of ASH, acknowledging that it’s been six years since a journalist formally toured the hospital.

Critics, including the chair of psychiatry at Valleywise Health System, Maricopa County’s hospital system, say state hospital administrators are leaving chronically mentally ill people in settings meant for short term stays when these patients would benefit from treatment at ASH. They also want to lift a 55-bed limit at ASH that’s part of the Arnold v. Sarn settlement. 

One of the biggest concerns when it comes to hospital stays is that they simply aren’t long enough. There’s a well known saying in the mental health system—“treat, street, repeat.” In other words, if a person having a mental health crisis is not kept in a secure facility long enough to truly be stabilized, they will quickly find themselves in crisis again, likely leading to another hospital stay—or a tragedy. Darren Beach, who was hospitalized 16 times in 18 months, is a good example.  

It’s clear that AHCCCS administrators recognize the need for longer hospital stays—or, at least, want the federal government to pay for them. A 2017 application for a federal Institutions for Mental Disease waiver to allow for reimbursement for hospital stays longer than 15 days in a calendar month remains open. (This does not apply to government run facilities like the state or county hospitals.)

According to state data, in fiscal year 2019, 15,413 people in Arizona’s mental health system accounted for 24,617 psychiatric hospital stays. 

Of those visits, 573 visits were more than 15 days.

Only 15 visits exceeded 45 days. 

And then there’s the challenge of what happens once someone does get out of the hospital and is ready to live in the community. 

A lack of safe, supported housing—considered by many to be the single most important factor in the successful long-term treatment of a person with mental illness—continues to elude many of the sickest people in the system. People interviewed for this story reported that family members with chronic mental illness were released from psychiatric hospitals to the street. There’s a statewide housing waiting list of 2,800, and more who are unable to use HUD vouchers, sometimes because of a lack of housing inventory.

Some people with chronic mental illness live in unlicensed boarding homes, also called board and care homes, long held up as a relic of the pre-Arnold v. Sarn past that never completely went away. There might be fewer than there used to be, but that’s difficult to know since no one in Maricopa County’s SMI system appears to be keeping track. The boarding homes operate under the radar for the most part—but police know they exist, sometimes answering hundreds of calls at a single address. Some have become hotbeds of violence, drugs and substandard living conditions.  

Responsibility for providing services to people with serious mental illness in Arizona falls to the state’s Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS). 

(A person doesn’t have to be Medicaid-eligible (Title XIX) to receive services. That said, non-Title XIX recipients do not qualify for as much. For example, they often cannot get name-brand medications. Chick Arnold thinks this should be litigated in the future.) 

In turn, AHCCCS contracts with Mercy Care, one of several regional behavioral health authorities in Arizona charged with providing services to people with serious mental illness. Mercy Care then contracts with individual providers who actually offer services like case management. 

The state’s Department of Health Services operates the Arizona State Hospital. 

AZCIR sent lists of questions to AHCCCS, Mercy Care and the Department of Health Services. 

Mercy Care did not respond to the list of questions. Earlier this year, a spokesperson turned down a request for an interview, and instead sent links to public reports on the AHCCCS website. 

In its response, AHCCCS wrote that the agency “takes all complaints and grievances about the quality of care seriously, and wants to obtain enough information to be able to fully investigate and resolve issues, whether they be individualized or systemic.“

With regard to ACT teams, AHCCCS wrote that, “Few communities around the country provide ACT to 4.3% or more of their adults who have SMI, whereas 6.6% of Maricopa County residents received ACT in 2019. 

“After an in-depth review, it was determined that only 29 of the top 100 service utilizers were on an ACT team because the remaining individuals either declined ACT level of service, did not meet diagnostic criteria for an ACT team, or they were already receiving a service that would be duplicative of ACT.”

And researchers “found that ACT team services were consistently provided once the need for services was identified.” 

AHCCCS did not respond to questions about methodology in the Arnold v. Sarn Quality Service Review.

In his agency’s response, DHS spokesman Steve Elliott wrote that federal privacy laws prevent the discussion of individual patients at the state hospital. 

“Patients are encouraged to file grievances when their concerns are not remedied at the patient treatment unit level. Hospital investigators educate patients through the grievance process investigation,” Elliott wrote. 

He did not address the issue of possible retaliation against patients who file grievances. 

With regard to the 55-bed limit at the state hospital, Elliott responded, “ASH operates according to the settlement of Arnold v. Sarn. It is not our place to offer an opinion on the terms under which we are required to operate.” 

Just about everyone involved in the lawsuit and settlement has an opinion—and doesn’t mind sharing it. 

Steve Schwartz, a national public interest lawyer who helped shut down psychiatric institutions in places like Massachusetts, was a plaintiff’s attorney in the case and signed off on the 2014 settlement. In an interview this spring, Schwartz said he’s pleased with the outcome. 

“They can’t go on forever,” he says of class action lawsuits, adding that he often refers to the successes of Arnold when working with other states on reforms. 

“The end point is never that all the people in the class are getting all the services,” Schwartz says. “That’s not going to ever happen. And so the end point has to be some blend that the majority of people are receiving a substantial portion of supports that allow them to do certain things, even though there are some big gaps.”

We let this group of people completely fail. To me, it’s the most inhumane thing that could ever be.

JOSH MOZELL

Chick Arnold retired at the end of 2020, handing his cases and his cause to a young lawyer named Josh Mozell, who has several years’ experience as a case manager in Arizona’s mental health system.

Mozell says he has his dream job—and it’s a nightmare. He contends that when it comes to treating the very sickest, the system is the worst it’s ever been.

“We let this group of people completely fail,” he says. “To me, it’s the most inhumane thing that could ever be.” 

Mozell’s cases include a man who says he was isolated after he screamed down a jail toilet at demons only he could hear; a man having a psychotic episode who was accidentally released from a mental health facility because he shared a first name with another patient; a woman whose mother chased her across the country and back to Phoenix, where she waited a year for a bed at the state hospital; a man whose son thought he could heat a frozen TV dinner still in the box on his stovetop and lived in filth even though he supposedly had the highest level of case management; and a man who ended up intubated in the hospital for six days after his case manager placed him in a group home with cats despite the fact that he’s deathly allergic.

Attorney Josh Mozell sits for a portrait in his office’s conference room in Phoenix on June 23, 2021. (Photo by Alberto Mariani)

“People don’t come to me when the system’s well,” Mozell says. “They come to me when the system’s doing poorly.”

Mozell represented Sommer Walter, Darren Beach’s half-sister, when she needed help getting guardianship of Beach in 2019.

Beach is now at the Arizona State Hospital. He waited a year for a bed. 

He decompensated further at the county hospital, according to Walter, and it’s been worse at ASH. 

“I hate to even say it out loud but Darren is actually more ill,” Walter wrote in an update to AZCIR in September. 

“He is more violent in his thoughts and is threatening harm to others and is very paranoid. He’s hearing voices that sound like “whispers.” 

“On my darkest days,” she wrote, “I have found myself driving to the hospital, parking across the street and weeping. Even though he’s here, he’s not really here. I’m mourning a living person and it’s such a hard way to live.”

Rachel Gold contributed reporting to this article.