Thank you to all who attended The Alliance for Rights and Recovery’s 27th Annual Legislative Day in Albany yesterday! We had a wonderful, and very passionate, group of people who use services, providers, and other mental health advocates come from all over the state to push for the 3.2% Cost of Living Adjustment, needed criminal justice reforms, and funding for critical mental health services. See the attached document to learn more about our full legislative agenda this year. Special thanks to the Mental Health Committee Chairs, Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther and Senator Samra Brouk, as well as Assemblymembers Harry Bronson and Monique Chandler-Waterman for speaking at our morning press conference pushing for passage of the 3.2% COLA, Daniel’s Law mental health responder pilots, and Treatment not Jail!
We must keep the momentum from yesterday’s event going as the legislature finalizes their budget proposals and begin negotiations with the Governor’s office for the final budget. Our continued efforts will be essential to ensuring our priorities are included in the final budget, especially as we see increased calls for coercion via court mandated treatment and involuntary hospitalization. The Alliance is committed to pushing back against coercion and instead creating a robust mental health and substance use services system which prioritizes early prevention and diversion from unnecessary institutionalization, voluntarily engages people, offers the appropriate responders for crisis calls, and supports people’s reintegration in their communities of choice after leaving institutions. We will continue to call on your support to help us make this caring, person centered system a reality. See below to read an excerpt from our legislative day which calls on our leaders to put facts, not fear, at the center of new mental health initiatives and funding. Continue to monitor this email to learn more about how you can join our advocacy efforts this legislative session and beyond.
FACTS OVER FEAR
Expanded Use of Coercion and Information Sharing without Consent
Over the past few years, NYS public policies have steadily and dramatically increased the use of coercion as regards New Yorkers with mental health, addiction and trauma-related challenges, expanding the use of involuntary hospitalizations and outpatient commitment orders related to Kendra’s Law.
Further, OMH recently released new guidance that will permit the increased sharing of Protected Health Information (PHI) without consent and require all New Yorkers seeking inpatient psychiatric care to undergo screening for violence.
Abrupt policy shifts of this nature must be tied to increased media and policymaker depictions of our community members as violent threats to the public’s safety, despite the data to follow. While it’s distressing to see rates of violence rising around us, we cannot stand by and watch the scapegoating of our community and the steadily increasing attacks on our rights to live freely within our communities.
System Failure Not Patient Failure
What’s also clear are the prevalence of system failures caused by ineffective engagement of people in need, failed hospital discharge plans, increased resistance caused by forcing people to accept services and medications that may have already failed them in the past, inadequate coordination of services, a system wide workforce crisis that has resulted in an over 30% job vacancy rate across our system and a systemic disinvestment policy of over 13 years to broken promises to add Cost of Living Increases to our system, resulting in a total loss of $500 million.
Governor Hochul’s unprecedented commitment to increasing funding to our sector has been extraordinary. Last year’s billion-dollar multiyear investment is helping us to fix up our existing housing system’s infrastructure, deploying new outreach programs and expanding new clinic and peer led models. And the Governor’s record of getting new programs rapidly out the door and on the streets has been a remarkable feat.
But we must not lay the blame for a deeply ingrained history of system failure at the feet of our family, friends, neighbors and peers who live with major mental health, addiction and trauma-related challenges. And, political leaders’ fears of being tagged as ‘soft on crime’ must not intimidate them to support the steady erosion of our dignity and rights that we are seeing today.
False Conflation with Violence
The science is very clear: people diagnosed with major mental illnesses are involved in 4.3 % of violent crimes: according to respected researchers “violence in the community could be reduced by less than five percent if major mental disorders could be eliminated.” And critically, people with mental illness are eleven times more likely to be victims of general violence and five times more likely to be murder victims. Among the most stark and heartbreaking examples of the latter lies in the brutal choking murder of Jordan Nealy on a New York City subway last June, a man with a long history of unmet needs, poor service coordination and abject system failure.
There is No Evidence that Coercion Helps People with Mental Illnesses
A 1999 Bellevue study found that improved discharge planning and care management were the key to improving the lives of people with major mental health challenges, whether or not they received services voluntarily or via court order. The conclusion was clear: more and better services are the key, not more coercion.
The Legislature authorized a 2009 Duke study to directly compare the impact of voluntary vs involuntary approaches but conceded that it didn’t do so, citing that “it is difficult to assess whether the court order was a key ingredient in promoting engagement or whether comparable gains in engagement would have occurred over time with voluntary treatment alone.”
In 2017, the Duke study’s primary author found that “despite the current interest in outpatient commitment orders as a means to reduce violence, rigorous empirical evidence to employ it on that basis is slim.” In 2022, the same expert acknowledged that “there’s room for more research comparing assisted outpatient treatment with specific voluntary programs.”
Thankfully the NYS legislature has ordered a new study that will be directly comparing the impact of services on two identical groups, one of which will be participating due to a Kendra’s Law order and one that will be participating voluntarily.
Huge Racial Disparities in the Application of Kendra’s Law
As of last week (2/24/24), OMH’s calculations continue to starkly confirm longtime and vast inequities in the application of Kendra’s Law on people of color in New York with 82% of all orders in NYC ((up from 77% in 2021) and 68% across the entire state levied at black, brown and Asian New Yorkers.
We Know What Works!
We come to Albany today seeking investments in proven voluntary models that best
- engage supposedly ‘hard to engage’ individuals in trusted relationships and effective services that are delivered by peers who have lived expertise in recovery from the most daunting challenges,
- divert distressed individuals from avoidable and traumatizing ER visits, hospital stays, contacts with the police and incarcerations and that
- support people with long histories of repeat failed hospitalizations and discharges to break cycles of relapses and readmissions and recover in communities of their choice.