Commentaries from the Edge

The City of Los Angeles began to build a magnificent architectural beauty for its Central Library in the downtown area. As part of the ceremony to mark the building’s site in 1925, a time capsule was created and buried. When the Central Library opened its doors in July of 1926, the Time Capsule was securely covered buried in a cornerstone made of Indiana Limestone. Did the Leaders of the City and...

The approach and the entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library in the City’s downtown, is both dramatic and inviting. The experience can conjure the feeling of entering a Cathedral. One is walking through arches, rotundas, gothic high ceilings past large posters, rare paintings and sculpture, and ahead the awesome sight of escalators facing huge figurines hanging overhead. It is from the escalat...

From radio days as an Actress, to the political halls of California State and County governments, Sheila Kuehl has always excelled. In her youth and young adulthood she was in key roles on very popular T. V. programs for years. At Harvard Law School she was a leader in various campus organizations, and once a Lawyer, began to use her power and influence to make a difference for good. Los Angeles b...

The need for calm, for compassion, to feel centered, all attributes that can be result of meditating according to return guest to the podcast, Dr. Marvin J. Southard. He carries an expertise about meditation not only professionally as a leader in the field of mental health, but personally as a long time practitioner. Listen to his ideas of what meditation is, how it can benefit your daily life and...

Podcast Guest Professor Paul Bergman easily expresses a kind of joy and delight he has enjoyed in his over 40 years as a Professor at the UCLA School of Law. As retired and now with the status of Emeritus, he continues to allow his students at the Law School to contemplate their upcoming profession in a special light. Listen and you will hear from a pioneering educator who chartered new directions...

Los Angeles, the City of promise, a history where people came to start life anew, native born Americans and people from around the world. Once again, Dr. Fernando Guerra is a guest on the podcast program for the third time. This year 2025 is closing, a year like no other in Los Angeles. Dr Guerra, Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles (StudyLA) at Loyola Marymount Univers...

It is the Summer of 2025, a time like no other in Los Angeles, California. There is drama on the streets, especially in Latino neighborhoods, where masked men jump out of unmarked cars and grab people who look like they might not have citizenship papers. It is at this time that the Latino Theatre Company has decided to mount their famous play, AUGUST 29, originally premiered in 1990, about a crisi...

A visit to the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese gives the opportunity to enter a world envisioned by the L. A. Archbishop Jose Gomez, and Pope Francis just days after his passing. And how can we describe that vision? One way is to picture the great power of a Church with a following of five million across the expanse of Parishes in Southern California, dedicating this power to making a better life...

As the podcast theme of community emergency outreach programs at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) comes to an end for the month of December, 2024, it is clear that creative innovation is making a difference. In this episode, Francisco Tan, Psychologist and head of the LACDMH Psychiatric Mobile Response Team (PMRT) takes us into the field with his description of what his...

Miriam Brown leads the way at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) with the broadest view of the ways the department can and will respond to a long menu of emergencies in a City like Los Angeles, California. Her expertise, and even more, her dedication, has brought her to the position at LACDMH of Deputy Director of the Emergency Outreach and Triage Division. Her many years...

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) has developed a robust way of delivering vital services to people suffering from a mental health crisis. It has grown over the years and rests firmly in 2024, in a campaign called - “Who Do I Call for Help”? It is a campaign for the community introducing a national number #988, available 24/7. That number is a key part of the LACDMH progr...

Here is some good police news. Here is a tale of lessons learned from past mistakes. Here, come and listen to ways institutions, organizations, work cultures and people always have the potential to change for the better. Bac Luu, a leader with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH), is heading a program that is embedded in the offices of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD...

A few years ago the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) went forward to create new kinds of services in unchartered waters. What developed was a courageous and innovative program called, Street Psychiatry-HOME (Homeless Outreach Mobile Engagement) Team. It was courageous because certain techniques to help seriously mentally ill people living on the streets had never been tried...

Dr Shayan Rab goes where Psychiatrists have rarely gone, into the streets where the unhoused of Los Angele, California, strive to survive. He uses the word - majestic - to describe his daily work experience, a word that means beauty and dignity. It is how he sees the opportunity to save a life and to change systems to respond to this USA humanitarian crisis. Through the Los Angeles County Departme...

We are continuing with a series of episodes on Street Psychiatry, learning about various parts of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH)’s program called The HOME Team. Guests on this episode are key to the program’s successes, treating people like in an open air hospital to save lives. They are Dr. Yelena Koldolskaya, Psychiatric Supervisor and Medical Director over a team of...

In Los Angeles, California, there is a smaller City within a City. The smaller one is the City where its citizens live and die on the street. The numbers are staggering. At the last approximate count, there were over 75,000 people trying to survive unhoused and, at the same time, thousands who are dying. Only a few years ago the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) started a pio...

As the last series of podcast episodes highlighting the new CARE Court, a Superior Court of the State of California, initiated in December of 2023, our guest is Dr. Sarah Church, Supervising Psychologist of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH), who has stories to tell. She has watched individuals with mental illness begin to grow and to turn their life around as they benefit...

We continue our podcast episodes on CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Court, a judicial place that creates a path to healing and rehabilitation for individuals suffering from untreated mental illness. A pillar of making this Court an agent for change rather than a place for punishment, is the partnership with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH). The gues...

In shining a light on some new developments in services at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH), CARE Court is a perfect example. Launched in December of 2023, and funded by the State of California, the department has joined an exciting collaboration of government agencies and community organizations fostering a wide systemic change. The CARE stands for Community Assistance,...

A persistent struggle in a metropolitan area like Los Angeles, California, is the struggle to treat persons with mental illness before it becomes severe. In the United States mental illness since the covid pandemic has become more of a crisis. On any given day in Los Angeles, someone is coming before the Courts having broken the law while experiencing a psychotic disorder. In December of 2023, a n...

As the special series on the podcast program continues, this is the final episode exploring Peer Resource Centers at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH). We are visiting with Jaime Gomez on the Eastside of the City, a Supervising Community Health Worker who relishes that his programming specializes in reaching out into neighborhoods. In other words, instead of being located...

The podcast series highlighting outstanding and innovative programs at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) continues with a visit to another Peer Resource Center located in South Los Angeles, California. This Center is part of a sprawling complex at the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Hospital, in an area renown for a lack of services. In a welcoming space expressed by both st...

The launching of a new series of episodes on this podcast, COMMENTARIES FROM THE EDGE, is covering important aspects of innovative and powerfully effective ways of supporting and promoting mental health. The projects, beginning with what is called the Peer Resource Centers, are part of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) in California. Given that many people will not enter...

The launching of a new series of episodes on this podcast, COMMENTARIES FROM THE EDGE, is covering important aspects of innovative and powerfully effective ways of supporting and promoting mental health. The projects, beginning with what is called the Peer Resource Centers, are part of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) in California. Given that many people will not enter...

There is courage and there is sacrifice, and Ruth Belonsky’s life is an example of both. Born into the world of Apartheid in South Africa, she grew up in an area called East London near Cape Town, segregated like everywhere in that Country. A child of immigrants from Germany, she believes that hearing stories of how her family escaped from the Nazis, motivated her to seek ways to end the laws sepa...