����������

Alliance Alert: Governor Kathy Hochul recently announced plans to expand the use of involuntary treatment for individuals with mental health conditions in ���������� State. This approach raises significant concerns about the rights and autonomy of those affected.

The Alliance for Rights and Recovery is actively working with a coalition of advocates to oppose any increases in forced treatment. Instead, we are urging the state to prioritize investments in comprehensive, voluntary alternatives that respect individual dignity while providing effective support.

Some of these include:

·�������������� Intensive and Sustained Engagement Teams (INSET)
·�������������� Daniel’s Law Mental Health First Responder Teams
·�������������� Passage of Treatment Not Jail Legislation
·�������������� Expansion of Clubhouse Programs
·�������������� Peer Bridgers for effective Hospital-to-Community Transitions
·�������������� Housing First Initiatives
·�������������� Other Critical Voluntary Community Services

These evidence-based approaches promote recovery, community integration, and long-term stability without the use of coercion.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to advocate for a mental health system grounded in compassion, choice, and empowerment. See below for today’s coverage of the announcement which include quotes from the Alliance’s CEO, Harvey Rosenthal, Glenn Liebman of the Mental Health Association in ���������� State (MHANYS), and Donna Lieberman of the ���������� Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)

Hochul Renews Push for Involuntary Commitment Legislation
By  | Crain’s Health Pulse | January 3, 2025

Gov. Kathy Hochul is reiterating her efforts to make it easier to involuntarily commit and treat people with severe mental illness in the wake of a spate of violence in the subway.

In a statement Friday ahead of the new legislative session, Hochul decried a recent parade of “horrific incidents” in the transit system and repeated a playbook she has pushed for years to boost psychiatric hospitalization and court-ordered treatment. Her executive budget will include changes along those lines when it is released in the coming weeks, she said, without providing specifics.

But some experts say the focus on adding more legal fixes hides a lack of accountability and coordination among existing programs meant to reach people living on the streets. And some of the efforts Hochul lauded, like a push to create more psychiatric beds, have yet to come to fruition.

Crime in the subway was up in December compared to the previous year, punctuated by several heinous and apparently unprovoked attacks: a woman was burned to death on a train car in Coney Island, a man was shoved in front of a moving subway on New Year’s Eve and multiple people were stabbed or slashed in separate events over the last week. The NYPD recorded 49 felony assaults in the transit system during four weeks in December, a 40% increase over the same period in 2023.

Hochul claimed recent attacks involved people with untreated mental illness and blamed them on a failure to reach homeless residents. The claim echoes several violent episodes in the past, in which perpetrators were previously known to law enforcement and mental health workers. But neither the governor’s office nor spokespeople for Mayor Eric Adams, who issued his own statement of support for Hochul’s latest call to action, have provided evidence that the most recent high-profile incidents involved people with a history of mental illness.

In her statement Friday, Hochul touted the steps she has taken to improve mental health services and flood the transit system with police and National Guardsmen. That included a $1 billion commitment to outreach and community-based services, supportive housing and psychiatric beds. But despite directives to remove more people by force from the subways, she said changes to state law were needed to make it easier for hospitals to commit people at risk of harming themselves. She also said state lawmakers should expand Kendra’s Law, a 1999 measure that allows court-mandated mental health treatment in the community.

That assertion is being challenged by a growing chorus of politicians and advocates both for and against more involuntary hospitalization. City Councilman Robert Holden, a conservative Democrat from Maspeth, Queens, accused Hochul of “moving the goalposts” in response to her statement Friday.

“Governor Hochul is gaslighting the public by punting the mental health crisis to the State Legislature under the guise of needing changes to Kendra’s Law,” he said in a statement. “The truth is that Kendra’s Law works when properly enforced, but city and state agencies have failed to follow through, and the Governor has failed to allocate the necessary resources to make it effective.”

Harvey Rosenthal, CEO of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, a mental health advocacy group that opposes efforts to increase involuntary treatment, said a lack of accountability by providers and policymakers has allowed people like Jordan Neely, who was strangled to death on the subway after cycling through outreach programs, to fall through the cracks. “Despite accessing a variety of services, our systems failed to provide him with the level of persistent engagement and well-coordinated and accountable follow up he deserved,” Rosenthal said.

Many of the legislative changes Hochul has championed are already in practice through regulation, including a 2022 directive from state Mental Health Commissioner Ann Marie Sullivan that clarified the criteria for involuntary commitment to include people who fail to meet their own basic needs. The Adams administration has backed a piece of state legislation known as the Supportive Interventions Act, that would increase the number of practitioners able to issue orders of involuntary treatment, a tool the mayor has said would relieve logjams in hospitals but which some advocates for the homeless say could be prone to abuse.

Hochul also hailed her administration’s efforts to restore psychiatric beds that were taken offline during the height of the pandemic “so individuals who need care have a place to go.” But she falsely claimed that the state was “close to reaching our goal” to restore the more than 1,000 shuttered beds; in November, the Office of Mental Health reported that just 517 beds had been brought back, a number that had not moved in a year.

To Curb NYC Subway Violence, Gov. Kathy Hochul Seeks To Expand Mental Health Laws
By Michael Gormley | Newsday | January 3, 2025

ALBANY — Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday proposed to expand decades-old laws — in response to subway violence — to give law enforcement and the court greater authority to order people to mental health facilities if they pose a danger.

“The recent surge in violent crimes in our public transit system cannot continue — and we need to tackle this crisis head-on,” Hochul said in a written statement Friday. “Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of a failure to get treatment to people who are living on the streets and are disconnected from our mental health care system.

“We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow ����������ers the help they need,” Hochul said.

Hochul proposes to change “involuntary commitment” laws dating to the 1960s and the 1999 Kendra’s Law that allows judges to require people who are detained as dangerous to themselves or others to undergo psychiatric care. Mental health advocates have supported the measures as an effective and humane way to treat people who are mentally ill.

The governor didn’t release details of her proposals or bills that would be submitted to the state Legislature. She will provide more information on this and other legislative proposals for the 2025 session in her budget proposal to the Legislature later this month, a spokesman said.

Hochul’s action is in response to several high-profile violent incidents in the ���������� City subway system. They include a woman who was set on fire Dec. 22, a fatal stabbing, a man pushed in front of a train and non-fatal stabbings this month.

Glenn Liebman, executive director of the Mental Health Association in ���������� State, raised concerns about Hochul’s proposal in an interview Friday.

“Tweaking existing laws is not the answer,” he said. “We sensationalize mental health issues as the sole reason for what happens and that’s not true at all…We have to wait for more specifics to find out what we are talking about, but by and large, I think we should be more focused on community services and supports.”

Liebman said Hochul has done a good job of increasing funding for community programs serving people with mental health issues after they leave hospitals or law enforcement detention, including an additional $400 million in the current budget. But the programs aren’t fully operating, in part because of staffing shortages in what he said are underpaid jobs.

These programs ensure people with mental health issues are not a risk to themselves or others when they re-enter society, but “bad discharges” result when there is a delay in getting medication and housing to outpatients, Liebman said.

“For 30 years our community has been dramatically underfunded in workforce hours,” he said. “Until we have a comprehensive response, bad discharges are going to continue to happen. So we have to have a full look…a critical review to see where are the failings in the system.”

He said there is also a concern for those with mental illness who may be unnecessarily deemed a danger and forced into a secure care facility.

“We’d have to see what the specifics are, but there is always that fear whenever you tweak existing laws like Kendra’s Law surrounding forced treatment,” Liebman said. “So, we have to look at that.”

Last month, Hochul sent National Guard troops into the subways to address the concerns of riders about rising violence. Hochul is trying to get ����������ers, including Long Islanders, to return to using the subway after the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a sharp drop in ridership.

The state’s congestion pricing plan is scheduled to start this month, with a goal of sending more people into mass transit, including the subways. Motor vehicle drivers will be charged a base fee of $9 to enter the most congested parts of Manhattan, in an effort to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. The fees will be used to fund massive renovations and repairs of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, as well as buses and commuter railroads.

���������� Governor to Push for Expanded Mental Health Laws, Citing Violence on Subway
By  | Jan. 3, 2025

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) —  Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to expand the state’s involuntary commitment laws to allow hospitals to compel more  into treatment, following a series of  in the ���������� City subway system.

In a statement Friday, Hochul, a Democrat, said she would push to change mental health care laws during the coming legislative session in an attempt to address what she described as a  of crimes on the subway.

“Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of a failure to get treatment to people who are living on the streets and are disconnected from our mental health care system,” she said.

“We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow ����������ers the help they need.”

Most people with mental illness are not violent and they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators, according to mental health experts.

The governor did not detail exactly what her legislation would change or offer other specifics of her plan. Instead, she said “currently hospitals are able to commit individuals whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this legislation will expand that definition to ensure more people receive the care they need.”

Hochul also said she would introduce another proposal to improve the process in which courts can order people to undergo assisted outpatient treatments for mental illness and make it easier for people to voluntarily sign up for those services.

State law currently allows police to compel people to be taken to hospitals for evaluation if they appear to be mentally ill and their behavior poses a risk of physical harm to themselves or others. Psychiatrists must then determine whether such patients need to be hospitalized against their will in a delicate and complex process involving several factors.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the ���������� Civil Liberties Union, said forcing more people into involuntary commitment “doesn’t make us safer, it distracts us from addressing the roots of our problems, and it threatens ����������ers’ rights and liberties.”

It is unclear how the governor’s plan will fare in the state Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats and begins its annual legislative session later this month.

Carl Heastie, the Democratic speaker of the state Assembly, told reporters that there is a “global acknowledgement that we have to do more on mental health,” but that he would have to see exactly what the governor is proposing. A spokesperson for Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader, said “clearly, public safety is a major focus of the majority. We want all ����������ers to feel safe. We look forward to seeing the details of the governor’s plan so we can discuss it further.”

Hochul’s statement came after a series of violent encounters in ���������� City’s subways, many of which have attracted national attention and heightened fears over the safety of the country’s busiest subway system.

In recent weeks, a man was  ahead of an incoming train on New Year’s Eve, a sleeping woman was  and a man  with a knife in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station on Christmas Eve.

Medical histories of suspects in those three cases were not immediately clear, though ���������� City Mayor Eric Adams has said the man accused of the attack in Grand Central had a history of mental illness and the father of the suspect in the shoving told the ���������� Times that he had become concerned about his son’s mental health in the weeks before the incident.

Violent crime is rare on the subway, which carried more than 1 billion riders in 2024. Still, random stabbings and shoves, along with other incidents, have unnerved riders and attracted heavy attention online.

Major crimes on the subways were down through November compared with the same period last year, but killings rose from five to nine, according to police data. Still, some have pointed to an increase in assaults since prior to the pandemic — there were 326 recorded through November in 2019, compared to 521 in the same period in 2024.

, a Democrat, has for years pressed the state Legislature to expand mental health care laws and has previously endorsed a policy that would allow hospitals to involuntarily commit a person if he or she is unable to meet their own basic needs for food, clothing, shelter or medical care.

“Denying a person life-saving psychiatric care because their mental illness prevents them from recognizing their desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility,” the mayor said in a statement after Hochul’s announcement.