With funding from California’s recently adopted budget, health care providers in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties will see increased training to better support mental health patients.
Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness Department Director Toni Navarro told the Sun the $5 million given to CenCal Health will strengthen services in non-specialty care areas. Her department is accustomed to training employees to manage severe cases, but now the focus is shifting to providers who work in lower levels of care.
“Where [training] hasn’t happened is in the non-specialty system, so we’re talking CenCal mental health. Mild to moderate mental health providers,” Navarro explained. “We’re talking primary care providers who are responsible to provide medication. With psychiatry being a disappearing specialty, many primary care physicians are the ones that provide just that once a month, once every couple of months medication stability. We need to train them in this understanding of these symptoms and how to keep people engaged.”
The symptom at the heart of these efforts is called anosognosia. It appears when a patient isn’t aware of their psychotic or neurological disorder because of the underlying medical condition.
Anosognosia is common in cases of schizophrenia, for example, when forced treatment isn’t sustainable.
“The whole goal of engagement and building trust … that will help people feel comfortable to seek care and maintain treatment is really about hearing them and listening where they’re at, not being argumentative,” Navarro said. “It’s not that they’re resistant or defiant. It’s that they really don’t see that they’re sick. And so, how do you partner with someone so that they accept care?”
Funds will be spent on community education to teach an approach known as Listen Empathize Agree Partner (LEAP). It’s a method of communicating specifically with anosognosia patients. Navarro said there’ll be more in-person opportunities for loved ones to learn about building trust.
“Oftentimes it’s really difficult to sustain that training in real life with loved ones without the coaching, without the help there,” Navarro said.
She calls it training the trainers. The idea translates outside of family life, too, like when staff members retire from the county, and new employees need to learn the system.
The director added that part of the investment will go toward programs that may not be covered by Medi-Cal or toward patients who may not be enrolled in Medi-Cal.
California’s investment in CenCal comes at a time when the state’s mental health care landscape is changing. In July, a law replaced the Mental Health Services Act of 2004. The new Behavioral Health Services Act prioritizes services for those with the most severe needs and strengthening the industry’s workforce.
“There’s more money going toward maintaining housing, establishing and helping folks to try and maintain housing,” Navarro said. “But that means less money for some of the services that we were doing, especially the revocation of prevention.”
Once patients are stable, Navarro’s department is required to step them down to a lower level of care with CenCal, a system that isn’t prepared in the same way to work with those who have severe disorders and anosognosia. Patients in that transition may not feel understood and drop out of treatment, but as the Behavioral Wellness Department and CenCal Health continue to work together, Navarro hopes fewer patients slip through the gap.
This article appears in July 9 – July 16, 2026.
