A conservatorship is a legal instrument which grants a person the responsibility of being the legal guardian for another adult.  The person who is conserved is called the “conservatee.” There are different types of conservatorships and one which some people are familiar with is the kind of conservatorship put in place for an aging adult who has lost their ability to handle their own affairs. This can happen with dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Some conservatorships are long term or permanent.  In the case of a medical condition, where it is assumed the conservatee will get worse as time goes by, the conservatorship may be permanent.

With the type of conservatorship granted regarding an adult with serious mental illness of any age, it is called an LPS Conservatorship and it has to be re-evaluated every twelve months. “LPS” stands for Lanterman-Petris-Short. This type of conservatorship is part of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967. With mental illness, there is great variance in the diagnoses, the functionality of the conservatee, as well as their prognosis.  A person might need to be conserved for only one year, whereas someone else might need to be conserved for several or many years.  This law gives the people involved and the courts regular intervals to determine if the renewal of the conservatorship is justified.

An individual cannot just make an application to the court to conserve another person without compelling evidence that the disabled person needs that level of care. With mental illness, it is challenging to get the conservatorship to begin with, let alone maintain it.  This is an area of great frustration to family members and advocates who know that comprehensive, therapeutic treatment often does not even begin until their loved one gets conserved.

In most instances, an application for LPS Conservatorship starts with an involuntary hold in a psychiatric facility. Getting an unstable person into the hospital is also a challenge, so there are many hurdles to overcome before the prospect of conservatorship becomes attainable. Relatively few people who are admitted for psychiatric care end up being conserved.  The mental health care system doesn’t have the resources to care for the number of people who should be conserved and while they wait for the legal process to finalize. There are also insufficient residential programs for the conservatee to be discharged to, where they can get competent, supervised care.

The conservator may be a family member, often a parent or adult sibling.  The conservator may also be a private agent who does that kind of work as their chosen profession.  Cities and counties have their own Public Guardian departments to act as Conservator when there is no family member to do it. You may have heard the expression, “ward of the state,” which is when the Public Guardian takes on the role of legal guardian for a minor or seriously disabled adult.

The conservator is in charge of the conservatee’s medication management. In fact, a doctor cannot examine a conserved individual, do any medical procedure, nor prescribe medication, without the consent of the conservator. This law gets violated on a regular basis, much to the detriment of the patient. Even when conserved, many hospital and IMD psychiatrists do not wait to get authorization from the conservator before they change the patient’s medication.

The conservator also has the final say on where the disabled conservatee lives, including the initial discharge from a hospital setting. If the conservator does not approve of the discharge plan, the nurse and discharge planners need to come up with another solution.  The conservator will sign all legal documents on behalf of the conserved, who also gives up their license to drive in most cases.

Some conservators also take on the role as Conservator of Estate, which means they handle the personal finances of the conserved.  In many cases, the seriously mentally ill person has no financial assets to speak of, so the conservator will only work as Representative Payee for the conservatee’s Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

While the duties of a conservator are meant to help keep the conserved person stable, safe and working towards higher functionality, the conservator is not legally or financially responsible for any property damage or physical harm caused by the conservatee.