County Mental Health Law Plan

The laws relating to persons with mental illness or intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) are complex and span several different codes affecting multiple, diverse stakeholders.
For this reason, the JCMH created the County Mental Health Law Plan (CMHLP) program. The CMHLP is a JCMH pilot program that offers technical assistance, tools, and resources including a checklist and template to support eight counties in their work to create a County Mental Health Law Plan over a six-month period. The goals of the pilot are to determine if creating such a plan encourages discussions that add collaboration, efficiency, cost-savings, and accountability to county mental health law systems.

The Administrative Judge from each county will create a multidisciplinary team, if one does not already exist, that would review the JCMH Mental Health Law Checklist and then complete a template reflecting the county’s current and future plans related to the relevant mental health law issues according to the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM).

By participating in this program, a county will: identify gaps and resources, clarify roles within the county, streamline complex MH processes, provide access to FREE resources, identify MH best practices, and create accountability.