Given the persistence of seriously mentally ill individuals languishing on the sidewalks and the subways — which is bad for those people and a problem for the city as a whole — Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul are both correctly arguing it should be easier to take people to the hospital to assess whether they’re a danger to themselves or others and easier to admit them for care once they get there.
Yet the Democrats who control the state Senate, under Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, want to go backwards and make it that much less likely that people whose mental illness now goes untreated will get the help they need. Very wrong.
The Senate’s bill would take the current vague standard, which refers to the “likelihood to result in serious harm,” and change it to a narrower standard of “imminent risk of serious physical harm” — a standard almost no one would ever meet. What the mayor and governor want to do is codify language in the law to make it clear that the inability to take care of one’s basic needs constitutes danger to oneself.
It’s eminently sensible, and already the standard in case law — and explicitly part of the law in 48 other states. But until the New York statute itself changes, too many professionals such as social workers will be hesitant to take obviously unstable people to see psychiatrists who can judge whether they might need treatment or even commitment, and too many doctors will refuse to admit them. That will let schizophrenia or other serious psychoses fester and increase the likelihood that one day, an individual might do something terrible to themselves or those around them.
It’s not just Adams and Hochul who understand the problem that needs fixing. Mayoral candidates who proudly call themselves progressive like Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos support lowering the standard for involuntary removal and commitment, at least in concept. So does mayoral frontrunner Andrew Cuomo, though it’s worth noting that when he was governor, he continued a pernicious decades-long trend and significantly reduced the number of inpatient psych beds statewide.
Rarely have this many stars aligned behind a necessary policy fix.
But the Senate wants to throw up more barriers. Whereas today, law enforcement can correctly remove people on their own, under the Stewart-Cousins measure, they’d be required to notify and, where possible, defer to professional crisis response teams, which will lead to paralysis rather than action.
Rather than give additional powers to nurse practitioners, the Senate would ensure that only doctors have the authority to certify involuntary admissions.
And rather than strengthen Kendra’s Law, which is designed to subject more people in need to outpatient treatment plans, the Senate would largely keep the status quo.
Sure, the Senate would add a comically paltry $2 million to bolster non-police crisis response teams. And would spend a bit more money on psychiatric beds and mental health worker wages.
But the sum total of all these provisions, if they were to become law, would render it all but futile for a cop or police-practitioner team to bother disturbing a psychotic, unkempt individual talking to himself on the subway bench. The result is that cops and social workers and others would increasingly wash their hands of people in crisis as they grow worse and worse and worse and worse. Rarely have politicians who call themselves leaders abdicated their responsibility more profoundly.