For more than 40 years, Chick Arnold was Arizona’s most forceful voice and effective advocate for the rights of the mentally ill.
His 1981 class action lawsuit on behalf of Maricopa County’s seriously mentally ill population alleged that the State of Arizona failed to fund a comprehensive mental health system as required by state law. In 1989, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled, in Arnold v. Sarn, that the State had indeed violated its statutory duty, and the State’s subsequent compliance with the Court’s ruling has resulted in additional annual funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the benefit of seriously mentally ill Arizonans.
Chick’s efforts in that case prompted one commentator to assert, “Chick Arnold is to the mentally ill of Arizona what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was to African Americans during the civil rights movement.”
