A world gone mad: Schizophrenia and a journey through California’s failed mental health system
LOS ANGELES — Standing in the dappled sunlight of a Westside city park, Anthony Mazzucca was trying to make a point. The words flew out of him, like birds, a flock of words. He laughed at the thought.
Yet he wondered whether he was being clear. No one — not God, Obama, the devil, his counselor from high school — seemed to understand him.
It was the summer of 2015, and between the voices he heard and meth he had smoked, Anthony was once again slipping away.
Passersby might have seen just another homeless man talking to the trees. But in his mind, he wasn’t: He had a job as an incendiary non-pedophile informant for the FBI, and he had a home, Media Park off Venice Boulevard in Culver City. The cops left him alone, and his mother, Mary Liciaga, brought him food.
He was close with his family. He remembered standing up for a sister when she was bullied, giving money to another when she was broke.
“Now you don’t have to worry,” he had said, waving his hands over hers as if sprinkling coins.
But that was kid stuff. These were adult matters now — what with the demons in his brain, the strangers trying to poison him, the flying saucers, black widows and torture devices lying on the sidewalks.
He had tied himself to his bicycle with the belt to the bathrobe that he wore. He wanted to be ready when the other riders came and together they would fly through the night, city lights blurring around them until dawn.
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A popular adage in psychiatry goes like this: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, then we would be too simple to understand it.
Anthony might agree. Ask him what it is like to live with schizophrenia and his reply is “dorsch,” and if schizophrenia is as incomprehensible as that, then its treatment for anyone who is homeless is even more baffling.
Since 2013, Anthony has been detained, hospitalized and confined at least five times. His family tried to intervene and manage his symptoms, but the volatile nature of his condition and the cost of treatment made it impossible.
Deemed a danger to himself and to others, he passed through a system that helped him when he was in extreme distress but was unable to provide consistent, long-term care. For six years, nearly two dozen agencies — from the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Valley, from the Westside to Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles — got involved.
When he was severely psychotic, he was hospitalized. When he was medicated, he was sent to an acute-care facility. When he was able to care for himself, he was sent to a board-and-care, where he went off his medications, began taking drugs and ended up back on the streets, vulnerable to the next
