Alliance Alert: The latest episode of the NYCLU’s Rights This Way podcast, “We Know How to Solve the Mental Health Crisis. Will We Actually Do It?,” features a timely and urgent conversation with Alliance CEO Harvey Rosenthal and NYCLU Senior Staff Attorney Beth Haroules.
The episode unpacks how New York’s current response to mental health and homelessness—rooted in criminalization and coercion—is not only ineffective but deeply harmful. Harvey and Beth make clear: we don’t need more forced treatment, we need real investment in voluntary, community-based services that meet people’s needs with dignity and respect.
The conversation highlights:
- People with mental health challenges are more often victims—not perpetrators—of violence
- How expanding involuntary commitment fails to address root causes like housing insecurity and lack of support
- What real solutions look like, including peer-led engagement, Housing First, and accessible care
This podcast is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of mental health care in New York—and the urgent need to shift from coercion to compassion.
Let’s continue to push for what works: voluntary services, affordable housing, and lasting support—not handcuffs and hospitalization.
See below for an excerpt from the podcast and click here to listen to the full episode.
We Know How to Solve the Mental Health Crisis. Will We Actually Do it?
Rights This Way Podcast | New York Civil Liberties Union | March 27, 2025
It happens like clockwork. A person suffering from serious mental health problems is accused of a heinous and tragic crime committed against a stranger. Then the calls come from law enforcement, politicians, and right-wing tabloids to lock more people up. Rinse and repeat. This all happens despite the fact that people living with mental health challenges are 11 times more likely to be the victims of crime and violence than to commit an act of violence.
It is undeniably true that the status quo for how we address issues like homelessness and serious mental health challenges is untenable. But the response must not be to simply lock more people away. That doesn’t make us safer, and it doesn’t solve the root problems that lead to these devastating events.
Everyone deserves to have safe and stable housing, and we should all be able to get the health care we need when we need it. But for this to happen, we need meaningful, comprehensive, and paradigm-shifting new investments in affordable housing and our mental health care system.
If we don’t see these types of commitments from our state leaders soon, we are headed for incredibly dark days, especially with President Trump in office who promised to disappear homeless people into ill-defined “tent cities.”
On this episode, we talk about why our current approach to dealing with homelessness and serious mental health issues doesn’t work and what needs to be done to truly fix these problems with Harvey Rosenthal, Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery and Beth Haroules, NYCLU Senior Staff Attorney.
Excerpts from the podcast:
Simon: …I kind of wanna set the scene here as I did in the intro a bit as well. But it seems like what happens is there is a violent incident that gets, captures headlines and gets splashed across local news.
The suspect in the case is someone who has struggled with serious health issues, usually for years. And then the calls from politicians and law enforcement and prosecutors et cetera, you know. They come to say we should increase the number of people who are either imprisoned or involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities.
And just broadly now Beth, if [00:08:00] you could talk about what’s wrong with this cycle.
Beth: … I think at bottom what it exposes the cycle that we see an event, a cry for really restrictive interventions to take people away from participating in society, living their lives, and lock them up….
They’re not given the dignity of housing that is safe, that’s over their heads.
People are not given culturally competent, linguistically competent access to services. People cannot participate in recovery if they don’t have a therapeutic alliance. They don’t have a trust with the [00:12:00] folks who are providing talk therapy or suggesting they get into a medication regime, anger management classes.
If those services don’t exist in a way that the person is engaged and wants to participate, then, you know, you failed the person. And so, again, I go back to politicians really fail us because they have one trick in their playbook. The playbook has been written since the 70s, for better or worse, and they never move past this one limited band aid response of getting everybody out of public sight.
Harvey: You know, Beth, I want to jump on that word fail because we view a court order, a Kendra’s Law court order, as system fair. There are those that want to see the sign of a good system as more orders. We feel the exact opposite. But that doesn’t mean that we want to, you know, leave people on the street suffering and struggling.
It’s not like we’re defending people’s rights to [00:13:00] suffer. We’re defending their rights, frankly, to get a right, to have the right to get good care, good services and supports. That’s our responsibility, and too often we blame people. But we know how to help people, even now. We know how to help people in the worst shape, with the greatest sort of crisis.
We’ve learned so much in this field, and a lot of it has to do with peer support. Folks like me who’ve been there helping other people that are sort of trying to get there. And I could talk a lot more about that. But that’s really a key to Beth’s point about trust, it’s critical that a peer is. And another problem is funding in the system, because the relationships are always changing because the staff have to leave to get a better job…
Simon: And I just want to make the point as well that for the [00:14:00] calls to lock them up, it doesn’t like, even that is not being done and that is not a solution that any of us on this podcast are advocating to be sure. But it’s also not something that, correct me if I’m wrong, you two are the experts, but it seems like someone gets involuntarily committed, they get given some drugs, and then they get taken out onto the street again. And so they’re not even accomplishing their draconian goal of completely eliminating people with mental health challenges. They’re just, you know, putting a bandaid….
Harvey: Well, it’s a question of are you getting the right services by the right person at the right time in the right way? [00:18:00] And peer support, I think, has a lot to do with that. Again, we’re not trying to leave people on the street or coerce them. I think, by the way, there’s a false sort of comparison here, a statement which is we feel like right now we either have to reduce people’s rights or sacrifice public safety.
And we don’t have to do either one. We can actually fix both with the right kinds of services that we’re about to talk about. So if people are on the street, we have a whole continuum now. We have outreach programs that are run by peers…
I’ll skip to that INSET program which is the program that we created really to see if we could prove that peer services, voluntary peer services could work with people who had real difficult times.
The same profile is what Beth talked about. People who met the, all the criteria for Kendra’s Law. And we wanted to test out whether we could, if we engage them with peers and a different way and offering different services, whether they would engage. And 83 percent of the unengageable were engaged by the INSET program in its first six months in Westchester County.
And now that program has been adopted by the governor. [00:20:00] It wound up in the State of the State. You know, there are now going to be, by the time we’re done between the legislation and the governor, we’re going to double the number of INSET programs. That’s the way to go. That’s the right way to go. And by the way, it’s so much cheaper than 1,300 a day in a community hospital in New York City.
These programs really are very effective and cost effective.
Beth: And, you know, the sort of flip side to that is that we have an existing provision in the mental hygiene law that permits critical incident reviews that sort of fills in the blanks, right? You know, programs shouldn’t have to go out and test and then come in, hat in hand, to say, look we know how to do this, right?
The government, under 31.37 of the mental hygiene law, and that is the state and the office of mental health, should be convening critical incident review panels when there is a public safety issue that arises. And you know, it has not been used. It has been on the books [00:21:00] since 2013, 2014. It came out of a joint task force convened by the state and New York City in 2008.
…You know, it should be a mandate.
Anytime something happens, the parties who should be accountable should be at the table to assess what happened here. Was it a lack of services? Was it nobody watching? Was it no services? Were the services that were, you know, provided to the person something that they didn’t want, offered by a staff person that they didn’t like?
Was there some dropping off of that person [00:22:00] because non-compliant, can’t find them? It sounds like that clearly is what happened with a couple of the folks who have made the front page of newspapers, right? Including Jordan Neely, who a lot of reports he was over served. But nothing stuck, nothing reached him, nothing worked for him, and there was no effort to determine what was happening here.
What do we have that could reach him and make him commit to recovery? What would make him somebody who didn’t have to live on the street?
Harvey: You know, I would say that this is one of our main points as advocates this session is to say the legislature you want to keep the peace, you want to be tough on crime, you want to eradicate violence. Well, the incident review, you know, subcommittee, every time that there’s an episode of violence, if the people who should most be involved, providers, government, et cetera, really got to the basics of what happened and fix that. I mean, I was going to say Jordan [00:23:00] Neely as well. There are people, Daniel Prude, who was killed by the police in Rochester. And to go into why that happened, what could have happened. And so often, there’s so many things that could have happened upstream. Instead, we leave people out there until terrible things happen to them as well as others….
Please, download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.
We Know How to Solve the Mental Health Crisis. Will We Actually Do it? – NYCLU