Personally Speaking – The mother of California’s Proposition 63: Remembering Rose King
By Kathy Day
California severe mental illness advocates lost a tireless advocate last week when we learned of Rose King’s unexpected death following emergency surgery.
Rose was known as the Mother of Prop 63, the legislation also known as the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA). The law, passed in 2004, enacts a 1% sales tax on personal annual income over one million dollars. This revenue is used for services for the most severely mentally ill people in California.
Rose was not only a fierce proponent of the MHSA, but she was not shy about calling out abuses of the law. Rose even filed a whistleblower complaint in 2009, alleging failures in implementation of MHSA and other issues. She was quoted often in news articles about the failures of the mental health care system, sharing details of her own family history with mental illness.
I was more than a fan of Rose’s advocacy. I was also lucky enough to call her a friend. I had heard about the legendary Rose King long before I met her. We were introduced in 2014 by our mutual friend and fellow advocate, Teresa Pasquini, who together with Rose, founded the organization Mental Illness FACTS (Family and Consumer True Stories) to highlight personal experiences in the California system of mental healthcare.
I was so nervous to meet her for the first time. I was new to mental illness then and even newer to advocacy, so to say I was intimidated was putting it mildly. Still, I was excited to meet her and eager to learn anything I could from her.
We had a delightful time and quickly became friends. We met several times and had many phone calls. I remember once she called to ask for my advice. Wow! The great Rose King asked me for advice!
She wouldn’t like me calling her “great.” In her mind, she was just another family member fighting for her loved ones, and not very special. But to me, and so many others, Rose was special. She paved the way for so many of us to follow in her footsteps so that we can work for better treatment and services for our loved ones with severe mental illness.
If, like me, you were fortunate enough to meet Rose, you know that, despite all the headlines she generated, she was much more than an advocate. She was a wonderful wife, mother, and grandmother. Family was the most important thing to her. When she fought for legislative reform, she was fighting for her family and for all of ours.
In Teresa Pasquini’s online tribute to Rose, she wrote that Rose “never adequately received the recognition she deserved for bringing in billions of dollars to the state of California intended to fund serious mental illness systems to help families like ours and our beloved children.”
Sadly, sometimes the people who do the best work are not recognized during their lifetime. And Rose King did the best sort of work, fighting for those who are the most vulnerable.
I hope that, in time, Rose will receive the recognition she so richly deserves. In the meantime, let us rededicate ourselves to this fight, in her memory.
Kathy Day is the senior family liaison at Treatment Advocacy Center and a family caregiver.
