Carla Jacobs is a veteran mental health activist who has helped shaped the dialogue surrounding mental health public policies in California.  Motivated by family tragedies involving relatives suffering from schizophrenia, Ms. Jacobs began a personal crusade to change the treatment laws for people with severe mental illness.  She is guided by a basic principle that access to treatment for mental disorders is a human right as well as an obligation of and a benefit to the society that provides it.  With support from the National Alliance for the Mentally (NAMI), Ms. Jacobs has successfully directed advocacy and legislation campaigns to reduce homelessness and the criminalization of people with mental illness by improving standards and practices in community care.  She has served two terms of office as a board member of NAMI-California, followed by two terms as an elected board member of the NAMI National Board of Directors.  She has also served as Mental Health Commissioner for the County of Los Angeles, as a Governors’ appointee to the Board of Directors of Protection and Advocacy Inc., and as a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisor’s Task Force on the Incarcerated Mentally Ill, which was created to give that board recommendations regarding the LA County Jail System.  Ms. Jacobs was also a member of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS) Reform Task Force, a joint effort of NAMI-Los Angeles County and the Southern California Psychiatric Society.  She is on the Board of Directors of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit organization founded by E. Fuller Torrey in 1998 to eliminate barriers to the timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses.

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