Alliance Alert: Yesterday, the Alliance for Rights and Recovery staff and members stood alongside Senate Mental Health Chair Samra Brouk, Assembly Mental Health Chair Jo Ann Simon, and Assembly Member Sarah Clark at a press event in Albany to push back against Governor Hochul’s proposed expansion of involuntary commitment and advocate for voluntary, community-based solutions.
We thank our legislative champions for their strong leadership in rejecting forced treatment as a misguided response to New York’s mental health and homelessness crises. As they made clear, expanding involuntary commitment does not provide lasting solutions—it only hides people instead of helping them. Instead, New York must invest in proven voluntary services that engage people with dignity and support, including:
- INSET teams to provide intensive engagement for people who would otherwise be subject to involuntary outpatient commitment orders
- Peer Bridgers to support people as they transition from hospitalization to the community
- Housing First with ACT teams to provide easily accessible, permanent housing with wraparound support
- Clubhouses to offer recovery-based social connection, housing, employment, and linkages to other critical community and social services
- Daniel’s Law emergency response teams to provide health-led responses to mental health and substance use crises
With just weeks left before the final budget is passed, we must keep up the pressure to ensure the final agreement rejects involuntary commitment expansion and secures funding for voluntary programs that work—especially for people struggling with homelessness and serious mental health challenges.
The Alliance will continue to provide opportunities for you to take action, so stay tuned for ways to join us in advocacy and protect New Yorkers’ rights, dignity, and access to real recovery-focused care. See below for recent coverage of yesterday’s press event.
Hochul’s Involuntary Commitment Proposal Hasn’t Gained Favor in the Legislature
By Dan Clark | Capitol Confidential | March 19, 2025
Another issue that Democrats in the Legislature are, so far, not willing to concede is involuntary commitment.
Hochul wants to expand the conditions under which someone with a mental illness can be involuntarily taken to a hospital. That proposal was in response to violent incidents in New York City, including a homicide in which a sleeping woman was set on fire on the subway in late December.
It would allow authorities to take someone to a hospital from the street if their mental illness has made them incapable of meeting their basic needs, including shelter and food.
Medical professionals would then evaluate if that person should be committed to the hospital for treatment. If they determine that should happen, the person can be held.
That proposal has support from New York City Mayor Eric Adams and some Democrats in the Legislature. But there’s currently a consensus that Hochul’s proposal, as written, won’t fly.
How the Legislature is thinking about Hochul’s proposal
Top Democrats don’t view involuntary commitment as the answer for preventing violent incidents or reducing the number of homeless people on the streets.
“Before we are going to tell an entire population that they will lose their civil rights, certainly we owe it to them and all New Yorkers to better invest in voluntary services,” state Senate Mental Health Chair Samra Brouk said.
Instead of forcing someone off the street and into treatment, the state should fund more outreach teams and peer services, Brouk said. They can help people understand what treatments are available and if it would benefit them.
Making people feel like they’re being cared for, and protected, would lead to better outcomes, she said.
“We know that centering peer services in particular can really bridge the gap for an individual who isn’t yet ready for services through a provider,” Brouk said.
That doesn’t mean eliminating involuntary commitment altogether but that system can be improved as well, Brouk said. A huge gap right now, she said, is the lack of discharge planning for people released from a hospital. Without that, the person could wind up at square one.
But Assembly Mental Health Chair Jo Anne Simon told me that Democrats who support an expansion of involuntary commitment standards may not be thinking about it realistically.
“A lot of people are very troubled by the proposals,” Simon said, adding that some members view involuntary commitment as “a cure for homelessness.”
“The reality is that the public thinks if you are hospitalized, you’ll get treatment. You don’t get treatment, you get stabilized,” Simon said.
A big part of the problem, she said, is the lack of psychiatric beds. The state has cut funding for beds in the last two decades and even more were brought offline during the coronavirus pandemic to create more hospital space.
“We have made decisions that are now coming back to bite us,” Simon said.
Advocates, Mental Health Committee Chairs Call for Expanding
Voluntary Service Innovations that Work, Reject Involuntary Treatment Proposals
March 19, 2025
Contact: Harvey Rosenthal, CEO, 518-527-0564, harveyr@rightsandrecovery.org
Luke Sikinyi, Vice President for Public Policy, 518-703-0264, lukes@rightsandrecovery.org
New York State legislature’s mental health committee chairs Senator Samra Brouk and Assembly Member Jo Ann Simon joined advocates for mental health and substance use recovery, disability rights, independent living, and criminal justice reform to call for expansions in an array services that have been proven to work to voluntarily engage and support people with major mental illnesses in crisis across New York City and New York State.
“Today, we live in a policy environment that suggests we have to choose between promoting public safety or human rights, that to do one has to diminish the other,” said Harvey Rosenthal, CEO of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery. “The truth is programs that provide people with pathways to recovery, housing, innovative services, and that help people to recover using voluntary means will keep all of us safe!” he said.
During a time of great public unrest and fear, New Yorkers with mental illnesses have been falsely portrayed as a major threat to public safety and as a result, policy makers have been pressured to consider policies that “crack down on the violent mentally ill”, they said.
“While people with mental illnesses are involved in about 4% of the violence that occurs in the US, we are 11 times as likely to be the victims of violence, as evidenced in the horrific deaths of Daniel Prude at the hands of the Rochester police department in 2020 and Jordan Neely, who was choked to death on a NYC subway car in 2023,” said Luke Sikinyi, Vice President for Public Policy of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery.
The advocates emphasized that today’s mental health crisis is not caused by people with mental illness but is the product of unaddressed poverty, homelessness, stigma and discrimination, isolation, racism and long-standing and devastating inadequacies in funding for community based mental health services.
“Yet, some would have us address this crisis by returning us to the regressive policies of the past that would hide not help us, that would force us into treatment in a way that drives people away not towards the help we need and in cycles of regular relapses and pointless hospitalizations that do nothing to advance our recovery and our and the general public’s safety,” said Taina Laing, CEO of Baltic Street Wellness Solutions.
“We want to make it clear today that our goals are the same as our Governor, our state legislature and the public: to help stop the suffering and struggles of our people, far too many of whom suffer and struggle on our streets,” said Ruth Lowenkron, Director of the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. “We are in no way promoting people’s right to suffer but their right and our obligation to provide people with the best treatments we can.”
The advocates strongly opposed proposals that would expand the use of involuntary inpatient and outpatient policies, pointing to a number of proven service innovations that were birthed in New York State and that are proven to voluntarily engage and support people with major mental illnesses that have been included in budget proposals from Governor Kathy Hochul and both houses of the legislature, including:
- INSET teams that are successfully and voluntarily engaging 80% or more of people who might otherwise been considered for a Kendra’s law involuntary outpatient treatment order
- Hospital discharge plans that work and that offer access to
- A person who can walk alongside you for as long as needed, without a series of ‘warm handoffs’ (a Peer Bridger)
- A place to live that will accept you even if you are not fully engaged in treatment or are still using (Housing First residential programs with support from Assertive Community Treatment Teams)
- A place to go: a Clubhouse mental health support center.
The advocates also expressed their great appreciation to both houses of the legislature for their support for:
- First responder teams of mental health and emergency medical technicians in place of police envisioned under Daniel’s law
- Implementation of a statutorily approved Incident Review Process that will immediately investigate tragedies involving violence and affecting and people with mental illnesses and that will call for detailed corrective policies and practices.
“We also urge you to see that all of the $16.5 million in this budget be used to expand local housing and case management services as alternatives to coercive Kendra’s Law orders rather than pay for more staff to process more orders,” said Sikinyi.
“We also give great thanks to both houses of the Legislature for their critically needed proposals to provide hard pressed community agencies with a 7.8% rate hike to keep our agencies open and extend the resources to help us attract and retain a dedicated workforce,” said Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association in New York State.
Speakers included
- Senate Mental Health Committee Chair Samra Brouk
- Assembly Mental Health Committee Chair Jo Ann Simon
- Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association in New York State
- Mark Clarke, Co-Director for Programs, Baltic Street Wellness Solutions, Brooklyn
- Charles Benson, INSET Program Director, Baltic Street Wellness Solutions, Brooklyn
- Blaise Sackett, Executive Director, and Clubhouse members, Hudson Valley Clubhouse, Poughkeepsie