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Oregon first lady Aimee Kotek Wilson appeared in front of the House Judiciary Committee on April 3.
Kotek Wilson testified in favor of House Bill 2467, which would make it easier for officials to civilly commit people experiencing mental health crises who pose a danger to themselves or others.
Advocates, led by the National Alliance on Mental Illness Oregon, argue that the state’s current law is too vague and results in people in crisis being left to their own devices, which can result in a variety of bad outcomes, including harm to themselves or others, confrontations with police, or being taken to facilities ill-equipped to assist them.
“I am testifying today as a former practitioner who served highly acute, vulnerable populations—specifically, individuals living with serious mental illness," Kotek Wilson testified. “I know firsthand how essential this bill is to our ability to provide Oregonians with the care they deserve.”
Kotek Wilson earned a master’s degree in social work from Portland State University and worked at Cascadia Behavioral Health before her wife’s election as governor. She has said that part of her work involved case management of people with serious mental illness and evaluating whether people met the criteria for civil commitment.
As governor, Tina Kotek has made reforming and expanding Oregon’s woeful behavioral health system a top priority. Kotek Wilson’s desire to be involved in the policy and personnel decisions around those changes led to conflict with Kotek’s staff and played a role in the departure of several high-level staffers last year.
Related: Aimee Kotek Wilson Is Her Wife’s Closest Adviser and Highest Priority
Kotek Wilson appeared to pull back from involvement in her wife’s administration after the staff departures, and Kotek scrapped plans to create an Office of the First Lady with dedicated staff.
Prior to testifying on the civil commitment bill, governor’s spokeswoman Elisabeth Shepard says, Kotek Wilson took the step of registering as a lobbyist for the governor’s office. (The governor has already announced her support for HB 2467.)
In her testimony, Kotek Wilson urged lawmakers to consider the consequences of the status quo.
“Right now, the system is set up so that even when it is crystal clear to a practitioner that a client is in danger to themselves, it’s clear where they’re headed, and that they’re on the precipice of irreversible harm, we often still can’t intervene,” she said. “Cyclical, severe decompensation worsens a person’s overall prognosis and can take years off their life.”
Opponents of HB 2467, led by Disability Rights Oregon, say making it easier to commit people in crisis will not necessarily help them and could make matters worse by adding to their trauma. Oregon State Hospital, where civilly committed patients are supposed to be lodged, is desperately overcrowded already, critics note, and has been for years, so there is no place for civil commitments.
Oregon Public Broadcasting took an in-depth look at the long-standing issue earlier this week.
“The bottom line is this,” Kotek Wilson told lawmakers this week. “We can often see when a patient is about to take a devastating fall. Our job as practitioners—and as a community—is to do what we can to catch them before they fall, instead of having to pick up the pieces afterwards. Right now, our laws are preventing us from doing that in far too many cases. It’s unnecessary, and it’s cruel."
HB 2467 is scheduled for a work session April 8.
Correction: This story originally included an incorrect name for the group leading opposition to 2467. It is Disability Rights Oregon. OJP regrets the error.
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering rural Oregon.