With NYC plan for mentally ill, hospitals face complex task

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City's latest plan to keep mentally ill people from languishing in public is billed as a common-sense strategy to get them help.

By encouraging police officers and city medics to take more psychologically disturbed people to hospitals, even if they refuse care, Mayor Eric Adams says he's humanely tackling a problem instead of looking away. But his policy will have to navigate a legal challenge and a cool reception from some city lawmakers. In emergency rooms, psychiatrists must determine whether such patients need hospitalization, perhaps against their will.

It's no simple decision.

“Some people come in and they are very agitated, and they need to be restrained as soon as they walk into the emergency room. ... But there are also people who come in and they’re very calm and quiet, but they just tried to kill themselves two hours ago,” says Dr. Joel A. Idowu, who chairs the psychiatry department at Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island.

“A person who’s stable now might become unstable tomorrow,” he said.

Adams, a police-captain-turned-politician, announced the plan in late November. The first-term Democrat has focused on what he views as restoring a sense of safety and civic functionality disrupted during the coronavirus pandemic. Among other things, less crowded streets and subways brought new visibility to the people living on them, some of them mentally ill.

Under state law, police can compel people to be taken to hospitals for evaluation if they appear to be mentally ill and their behavior poses a substantial risk of physical harm to others or themselves.

That's often interpreted to mean people who are violent or suicidal. But Adams said he's using room within the law to address people “whose illness is endangering them by...