Anna, with her neice, "Josie"
After several days of visits with her sisters, uncle-in-law, niece, nephew, mother and her mother's partner Gary, Anna was admitted into Permahousing. Initial clinicians elicited her accounts of past experiences, assessing and recording her condition as based in early childhood sexual abuse trauma and the effects of long term psychiatric institutionalization. With her consent, both her case manager and Permahousing's director struggled to find her the safe, stable residential treatment and consistent on-going therapeutic relationship it was felt she needed to address her trauma. Such resources however, were not to be found in the public mental health system. Episodes of escalation, self injury and talk of suicide soon led Anna back again to the only options available – more restrictive housing, psychiatric emergency services, psychiatric hospitalization and locked facilities.*

In these facilities she was uniformly viewed as "schizophrenic", incapable of communication or insight and in need of forced control, symptom management and neuroleptic drugs. At times her past experiences with medication were ignored and she was forced to take dosages beyond what had been shown she could tolerate.

The first psychiatrist who saw Anna as she was brought into this system for help, told her to her face that she was "chronic", that she belonged in a state hospital, that she did not belong in the community of Santa Clara and that she should be sent back immediately to Norristown State Hospital. Heeding Anna's fear and her pleas to be allowed to stay in California with her family, her case manager successfully subverted the system's attempts to return her to Pennsylvania and within a few weeks Anna was officially established as a resident of Santa Clara County, California. On May 28, 1991, her grandmother M, who accepted Anna's collect phone calls and talked with her at least twice a week, died suddenly. Anna was devastated by the news, drawing and writing about her granmother's beautiful long white hair and how she wanted someday to be in heaven, in her grandmother's arms.

*SART, Zeller Goviea, La Casa del Puente, East Valley Pavilion, Don Lowe Pavilion, Barbara Arons Pavilion.