Alliance Alert: The Alliance for Rights and Recovery issued the following statement today regarding the enacted FY 2025–26 New York State Budget to underscore the critical crossroads at which we find ourselves today in mental health and social justice policy.
Our statement outlines the urgent need to:
- Expand access to voluntary, culturally competent, and peer-led services.
- Closely monitor the expansion of ‘last resort’ coercive treatment practices and the implementation of enhanced discharge planning protocols
- Redirect resources from institutions toward the proven community supports that people actually want and need.
- Hold the system accountable and identify needed systemic changes through transparent incident reviews
Read the full statement to see what’s at stake and how we must move forward toward a system rooted in recovery, rights, dignity and choice. We invite our allies, advocates, and elected leaders to join us in pushing for a community centered mental health system that supports not controls and helps not hides people in crisis.
Alliance for Rights and Recovery Statement
on the Enacted FY 2025–26 NYS Budget
Harvey Rosenthal, Chief Executive Officer
Luke Sikinyi, Vice President of Public Policy
This year’s enacted state budget takes us in two very different directions. While it includes some investments in housing, Clubhouses, outreach, children’s and forensic mental health services that move mental health and social policy forward, it also takes us many steps backwards with its expansion of the use of involuntary treatment and the role of law enforcement and the creation of yet another very costly and unneeded state psychiatric hospital. It also fails to offer a meaningful increase in funding to allow battered community mental health agencies and their workforce to address ever-rising unmet needs.
Involuntary Treatment: Facts Not Fear
Background: While the data makes clear that people with mental illnesses are responsible for about 4% of violence, several tragedies that either harmed them or the public led some in the media, in government and in the general public to adopt the false choice that in order to promote public safety, we have to reduce the rights of people with major mental illnesses.
The facts are that we can protect both public safety and human rights by ensuring access to a continuum of services that have been proven to engage and support people at all levels of need, including outreach and engagement programs, health-led first responder teams, crisis stabilization and respite centers that divert people from avoidable use of very costly emergency and inpatient services and when hospitalizations do occur, discharge plans that work which provide people with a person you can trust to be there (Peer Bridgers), a place to live (Housing First) that takes people regardless of the severity of their conditions and needs, and a place to go, most notably Clubhouse community centers.
Despite the state’s previous one billion dollar investment, the vast majority of counties in New York State offer few to none of these, leaving far too many people to fend for themselves.
Recommendations
- The state must commit to a second round of major mental health investments.
- In the meantime, it must speed up the implementation of previously authorized voluntary approaches: only a few of the authorized 24 crisis stabilization centers are up and running today!
Involuntary Inpatient Commitment: The FY 2025–26 Budget expands statutory authority for the involuntary psychiatric hospitalization of an increasing number of individuals who need assistance accessing housing, food and clothing, based on expectations that police officers are qualified to make assessments that these individuals might also have a mental illness. These assessments lead to “mental hygiene arrests” that can result in the application of handcuffs and forced transport for hospitalizations that may be both traumatizing and ineffective and ultimately drive people away rather than draw into the treatment they may want and need. The budget establishes the option of EMS involvement but only “if practicable,” leaving us very concerned that many communities will lack the EMS capacity needed for meaningful implementation.
Involuntary Outpatient commitment: the budget’s inclusion of automatic ‘rollover’ extensions in the use of Kendra’s Law controversial involuntary outpatient treatment orders without Court approval will only deny more New Yorkers their appropriate due process rights.
Recommendations
- the state must allocate all of the $16.5 million in this budget to support localities to increase access to proven voluntary alternative services, especially INSET and Housing First programs, rather than to hire more local staff to simply add more outpatient treatment orders to a heavily under resourced system.
- It must move quickly to complete and publish the results of a legislatively mandated study of the Kendra’s Law program to answer longtime questions about its appropriateness and efficiency.
State Hospital Expansion: While community-based service systems are starved for resources to fill in gaps, the budget needlessly spends $160 million to build yet another state psychiatric hospital, which will bring our total to 25 facilities, equal to the nation’s 4 other most populous states combined – California (5), Texas (9), Florida (5) and Pennsylvania (6). Thanks to the passage of the 1994 Community Mental Health Reinvestment Act, the state closed 5 state hospitals and redirected hundreds of millions of dollars into building up the community safety net.
Recommendations:
- It’s long past time to close, not expand, state hospitals in New York, in the manner of what the State is doing to overhaul and reduce the size of its prison system. Imagine if the $160 million was being used this year to prime the pump on a second round of major mental health investments into community services we so desperately need! The state should begin work on an updated Reinvestment bill to close another 5 state hospitals next year and use those funds to provide investments in the community services that keep people from needing repeat or long term hospitalization in the first place.
Meaningful Investment in Community Services and their Workforce
Our service system has been starved of proper investments to ensure a stable workforce and the ability for agencies to meet rising demand. The Alliance joined a coalition of behavioral health advocates, led by the Mental Health Association in New York State, in calling for a 7.8% rate increase in the human services sector, well above the Governor’s original proposal of a 2.1% inflationary increase.
While we and other advocates were successful in increasing the final rate in the Budget, it is unacceptable that the state did not prioritize addressing the chronic underfunding of community mental health services with a more significant investment. This is not about lacking resources—it’s about political will. The enacted 2.6% inflationary increase for human services workers falls below both inflation (2.9%) and the 7.8% advocates demanded to stabilize a burnt-out, underpaid workforce. This meager investment comes despite clear bipartisan legislative support and massive public outcry.
Recommendation:
- The state must make a substantial investment in the community based services organizations and their workforce to ensure our workers receive a living wage and agencies are equipped to meet rising demand for services as more New Yorkers look for support with mental health and substance use challenges.
An Inappropriate Role for Law Enforcement
The expansion of involuntary inpatient commitment policies will only increase the state’s overuse of police officers who are not qualified to make psychiatric assessments that needlessly result in mental hygiene arrests and traumatizing involuntary transport and hospital admissions. Additional training from the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services will not solve this problem.
Recommendation:
- The Alliance and other crisis response advocates thank the legislature and Governor for this budget’s creation of Daniel’s Law-inspired non-police crisis response pilots with $6 million that will be supported by a new Behavioral Health Crisis Technical Assistance Center. These must be running in advance of next year’s budget!
Addressing Racial Injustice
The evidence is clear that people of color are far more likely to be subjected to inpatient and outpatient commitment, arrests and barbaric use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails. In fact, 4 out of 5 outpatient commitment orders in New York City are levied at African, Hispanic and Asian Americans. These communities already face significant health disparities and limited access to quality, culturally competent mental health services. This systemic inequity means that instead of being offered voluntary, supportive services, people of color are more likely to experience coercive interventions that further erode trust in the mental health system and worsen outcomes.
Recommendations:
- To address these disparities, we must take significant steps in improving access to effective community-based services in communities of color, train workers to provide culturally competent support, recruit workers directly from these communities, reduce stigma, and eliminate the state’s overreliance on police for mental health interventions in the community.
Enhancing Forensic Mental Health Services
We thank the Governor and Legislature for including additional funding to support people with mental illnesses who are caught in the criminal justice system. The Budget has investments in forensic services that will help people better navigate the court system as well as get out and stay out of jails and prisons. These investments include:
- $14.6 million for Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) teams
- $8.2 million for Court-Based Mental Health Navigators
- $4.3 million for Transitional Housing for court-involved individuals
- $2.8 million for housing for individuals with SMI and criminal histories
Improved Discharge Planning
We support the stronger discharge planning requirements in the budget, including direct consultation and connection with existing community-based providers who are already working with people preparing for discharge, including follow-up appointments within 7 days, and the inclusion of peer supports and community services.
However, these provisions only apply to inpatient psychiatric discharges. People who are brought to emergency rooms in crisis but are not admitted will remain without meaningful post-discharge support. Even more concerning, the statute fails to provide discharge planning to people being released from correctional facilities—many of whom face serious mental health challenges and significant barriers to effective services and stability. The State must do more to address these critical gaps and ensure continuity of support for all individuals transitioning out of institutional settings.
While improved discharge planning requirements are a welcome and necessary change, the lack of adequate funding for community-based services like supportive housing, peer support, and outreach means that many people will still be discharged into the community with no services in place.
Recommendation:
- The state must pair long needed changes in discharge regulations with a substantive financial commitment to expanding hospital-to-community Peer Bridgers, increasing access to low barrier housing with Assertive Community Treatment teams, and including connection to Clubhouses as part of individualized discharge plans.
A Missed Opportunity to Expand the Role of Peer Service Innovations
While the State of the State, executive and one house budgets provided for greater expansion of peer outreach (INSET) and support for successful transitions from hospital to the community, the final budget offered greatly scaled back investments. For example, final allocation for INSET and Peer Bridger teams were cut in half, down to $2 million.
Recommendation
- There must be more clear support for peer workforce development or innovation. Instead of making greater expansions of the vital peer-led infrastructure, the budget remains more focused on traditional clinical services and law enforcement interventions.
Greater Accountability and Improvement
Incident Review Panels: In response to several high-profile violent incidents involving people with serious mental illness, a joint New York State/New York City panel of government leaders and experts produced a 2008 report featuring a recommendation to create “multiagency review panels to perform detailed, retrospective reviews of serious incidents that…may provide opportunities to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future as well as opportunities to improve the care of people with mental illnesses in NYS.” While the optional recommendation was placed into law in 2014, it has never been implemented.
This year’s budget requires OMH to convene at least 4 multi-stakeholder panels each year and to issue a cumulative public report every two years.
- Recommendation: The state must go further than the minimal expectations described in the budget to ensure transparency, timely reporting, and systemic analysis of these incidents. The work of the Daniel’s Law Task force provides an excellent example: thanks to the strong commitment by OMH and Commissioner Ann Sullivan, the state released a comprehensive report a year earlier than statutorily required. We urge the state to do the same with the Incident Review Panels by conducting as many panels per year that are needed to issue public findings and recommendations in contrast to relying on leaked details and slanted news articles. The New York Post agreed, writing that this “toothless provision once again let state mental health officials off the hook by stipulating that the findings of those panels can’t be released publicly.”
We agree: the panels must be more than paperwork exercises. They must drive quick and comprehensive reforms after tragedies occur.
Ongoing Close State Monitoring of the Use of Involuntary Treatment
- Recommendation: If we’re going to expand involuntary inpatient and outpatient commitment initiatives, the Office of Mental Health must ensure that all inpatient and outpatient commitment orders are evaluated as to whether they met legally required ‘last resort’ standards, or whether they were primarily the result of the lack of necessary voluntary services to help people meet their basic needs. Accordingly, the state must make a second major system wide investment in community mental health services to ensure thousands of people do not continue to languish on long waiting lists for essential housing and case management services as a recent finding demonstrated.
Next Steps
We will be out front in the advocacy for non-budget related legislation including:
- the Forensic Rehabilitation Act, which is expected to be introduced in the coming days,
- Treatment Court Expansion Act (TNJ),
- the bills included in the Communities not Cages package of legislation, and the Clubhouse Expansion act.
Going forward, the Alliance will be advocating for:
- MISCC led Olmstead Plan
- Full implementation of INSET, Community Hospital Peer Bridgers, the Behavioral Health Crisis Technical Assistance Center, and non-police crisis response teams to ensure they meet the intended goals of supporting more people with mental health challenges who have not received the appropriate services to keep them out of hospitals and jumpstart their recovery journeys.
The Alliance will continue to fight for a system that centers dignity, autonomy, and recovery—not coercion and control.