Q: What happens after the 72 hours?
A: One of five things.¹ You go home. You agree to stay voluntarily. You are certified for up to 14 more days of intensive treatment. A conservatorship petition is filed. Or a post-certification petition is filed under §5300.
The 14-day certification is by far the most common, and it comes with a hearing almost nobody is told to expect.
What a certification requires
Three conditions, all of them:²
- The professional staff have analysed your condition and found that, as a result of a mental health disorder or impairment by chronic alcoholism, you are a danger to others, a danger to yourself, or gravely disabled.
- The facility is designated by the county to provide intensive treatment and agrees to admit you.
- You "have been advised of the need for, but ha[ve] not been willing or able to accept, treatment on a voluntary basis."
That third one is a real condition, not a formality. A certification is supposed to be what happens when voluntary treatment has been offered and has not worked.
And "gravely disabled" has a carve-out worth knowing. You are not gravely disabled if you can survive safely without involuntary detention "with the help of responsible family, friends, or others who are both willing and able to help."³ But there is a catch that costs people their liberty: unless those people specifically indicate their willingness and ability to help in writing, they are not counted.³ If your family is willing to help, that willingness needs to be on paper, given to the facility, before the hearing.
Two signatures are required, not one: the professional person in charge of the evaluating facility (or a qualifying designee), and a physician or psychologist who actually participated in the evaluation.⁴
The certification review hearing
Within four days. "The certification review hearing shall be within four days of the date on which the person is certified."⁵
Read that precisely, because two things go wrong:
- It is four days, not four judicial days and not four business days. The Legislature used "judicial days" elsewhere in the same code — two judicial days for habeas, four judicial days under §5300 — so the absence of the qualifier here is deliberate.⁵
- The clock runs from the certification, not from when you were detained.
And if you have not been certified but you are still being held, a separate right applies that dates only from 2023: a certification review hearing within seven days of the date you were initially detained under §5150, plus an advisement of your rights and a meeting with an attorney or the county patients' rights advocate.⁶ On a 72-hour hold that is the right that applies to you. What a 5150 hold is →
Who runs it. A court-appointed commissioner or referee, or a certification review hearing officer.⁷ The independence rules matter: hearing officers are chosen from a list unanimously approved by a panel of the local mental health director, the county public defender, and county counsel or the district attorney — and "no employee of the county mental health program or of any facility designated by the county" may serve.⁷
Where. At the facility, in a place "compatible with, and least disruptive of, the treatment being provided."⁷ It happens on the unit, not in a courthouse, and it is conducted "in an impartial and informal manner… not bound by rules of procedure or evidence applicable in judicial proceedings."⁸
**Your rights at it, in the statute's own words:**⁹
- Assistance by an attorney or advocate.
- To present evidence on your own behalf.
- To question persons presenting evidence in support of the certification decision.
- To make reasonable requests for the attendance of facility employees who have knowledge of, or participated in, the certification decision.
- If you have had medication within 24 hours, the person conducting the hearing must be told — and told the probable effects of that medication.
That fifth one is the one to use. If you are sedated, the hearing officer is required to know it.
You are entitled to be present unless you waive that with the assistance of your attorney or advocate.¹⁰ The case for keeping you is presented by someone designated by the facility's director; the district attorney or county counsel may also elect to appear.¹¹
The advocate comes to you
This is the part that most changes what happens to a person, and it is written as a duty on the system rather than a request you have to make.
The certification notice itself must state that "an attorney or advocate will visit him or her."¹² Then: "as soon after the certification as practicable, an attorney or patient advocate shall meet with the person certified" to discuss the process and help prepare.¹³ The same duty appears for the seven-day hearing and for medication capacity hearings.⁶
Each county mental health director is required to appoint or contract for county patients' rights advocates, whose statutory duties include receiving and investigating complaints about "abuse, unreasonable denial or punitive withholding of rights."¹⁴
Ask for the patients' rights advocate by name. Access to one is a right that may never be denied for good cause.¹⁵
Habeas corpus, which runs alongside
Separately from the hearing, you may petition for habeas corpus at any time during treatment, and the court "shall either release the person or order an evidentiary hearing to be held within two judicial days after the petition is filed."¹⁶ Whoever delivers your certification notice is required to tell you about this right and to explain what the term means.¹⁷
Losing the certification review hearing does not spend it: after the hearing, the advocate must notify you of your right to request release and have a hearing before the superior court.¹⁸
What can come after 14 days
- §5260 — an additional 14 days where the person remains suicidal.
- §5270.15 — an additional 30 days. But this one is county-optional: the article "shall be operative only in those counties in which the county board of supervisors, by resolution, authorizes its application."¹⁹ Do not assume it exists where you are.
- §5300 — post-certification, up to 180 days, on one of three grounds.²⁰ Here you get the fullest protections in the whole scheme: the court must advise you of the right to counsel and the right to demand a jury trial, with a public defender appointed if you cannot afford one.²¹
And time off does not reset the clock. "The total period of detention, including intervening periods of voluntary treatment, shall not exceed the total maximum period during which the person could have been detained."²²
Do this: ask for the county patients' rights advocate by name, today, and ask when your hearing is. If family or friends are willing to help you stay safe outside the hospital, have them put that in writing and give it to the facility before the hearing — unwritten willingness does not count. Write down what you want to say and who you want called as a witness. And if you have been medicated, say so at the hearing: the officer is required to be told. Can they medicate me against my will? →
Sources
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5257(b)(1)–(5) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5250(a)–(c) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5250(d)(1)–(2).
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5251(a)(1)–(2), (b) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256(a) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. Compare §5276 ("two judicial days") and §5303 ("four judicial days").
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256(b), added by AB 2275 (Stats. 2022, Ch. 960), operative 1 January 2023.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.1 — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.4(b).
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.4(a)(1)–(5) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.3.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.2.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5252 — the prescribed form of the notice of certification, including the specific facts forming the basis of the opinion.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5255.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5520(a)–(d) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5325(h) and §5326 — the good-cause denial power expressly excepts subdivisions (g) and (h).
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5275 and §5276 — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5254.1.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5256.7.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5270.12 — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov; the additional 30-day certification itself is at §5270.15.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5300(a)(1)–(3) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5302; §5303 sets the four-judicial-day and ten-judicial-day timelines.
- Welfare & Institutions Code §5258.
All sections read on the operative text on 18 August 2026. This page describes the statute; it is not legal advice, and if someone you love is on a hold the patients' rights advocate is a faster route than any website.