Emergency Medical Services staff

[shoponhossaiassn]

Adams, a former police officer, said the city will be training and other medical personnel to "ensure compassionate care." He said the policy he's proposing "explicitly states" when it is appropriate to use this process to hospitalize a person suffering from mental illness even if they do not want to go.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announces new policies for hospitalizing people experiencing severe mental illness, on Nov. 29, 2022.
While emergency personnel already have the ability to involuntarily hospitalize those suffering from mental illness in certain limited circumstances, patients are often released after a few days when the immediate danger appears to be over.

Adams said he believed the law should "require hospital evaluators to consider not just how the person is acting at the moment of evaluation but also their treatment history, recent behavior in the community, and buy phone number list whether they are ready to adhere to outpatient treatment." He said he will work to have a new "basic needs" standard for involuntary admission written into state law.

But the city has a shortage of psychiatric hospital beds, a situation exacerbated amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit public hospitals particularly hard. Adams did not provide specifics for how he planned to increase the availability of beds at the city hospitals.

The mayor's announcement was met with caution by civil rights groups and advocates for the homeless, CBS New York reports.

A coalition of community groups, including the Legal Aid Society and several community-based defender services, said the mayor was correct in noting "decades of dysfunction" in mental health care. They urged state lawmakers to address the crisis and approve legislation that would offer treatment, not jail, for people with mental health issues.