Advocacy: Mental Health & Conservatorship Reform
Erica’s advocacy grows directly out of two institutional fights. As a government employee working inside two Los Angeles County psychiatric wards, she wrote Inside the Insane, a tell-all exposing life inside the wards and the institutional failures behind them. Her conservatorship reform advocacy grew out of her own family’s experience, chronicled in I’m Not Playing, and the response to her Next Avenue and Mad in America articles, which connected her directly with conservatorship victims nationwide, particularly across LA County, working together to advocate for change.
I’m Not Playing
By Erica Loberg
I’m Not Playing is a combination of poetry with commentary that gives a first hand account of the corruption of probate conservatorship in Los Angeles County. It sheds light into the untold truths of the conservatorship world of elderly abuse, and the network of people working behind it. Readers drawn to this story of institutional failure may also find Inside the Insane, Erica’s earlier account of retaliation inside LA County’s psychiatric system, part of the same throughline.
Inside the Insane
By Erica Loberg
Inside the Insane is a first hand account of life inside a psychiatric crisis ward in Los Angeles, California. From patients suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia to bipolar disorder disease, to major depressive disorder, Inside the Insane takes the reader inside the walls of the mentally insane and manifests the realities of the human condition.
Erica provides detailed accounts of patients screaming in restraints, to being locked in seclusion, to suffering from over medication, in radical raw detail. She also takes a look at the mental health system in Los Angeles County and exposes the concealed world of how society treats the mentally ill. From locked institutions, to board and cares, to living on the streets in Skid Row, the horrific conditions surrounding the life of a person suffering from a mental illness is explicitly exposed.
Press & Related Reading
- Next Avenue — “When Conservatorship Goes Terribly Wrong” → https://www.nextavenue.org/when-conservatorship-goes-terribly-wrong/
- Mad in America — “Psychiatrists: Criminals Behind Conservatorship” → https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/05/psychiatrists-criminals-behind-conservatorship/
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Erica Loberg | DTLA Poet & Author 