Every day, New Yorkers are involuntarily committed to hospitals and mental health facilities for psychiatric treatment. But what happens when a patient wishes to be released from a hospital or refuses medication? In this podcast, we are joined by Hon. W. Frank Perry to discuss Mental Hygiene Proceedings, a little-known area of the law designed to resolve disputes between mental health patients and the facilities responsible for treating them. In this discussion, Judge Perry describes his transition from a Supreme Court Justice in the General Assignment Part to his current role as the sole Judge presiding over Mental Hygiene Proceedings throughout New York County. This open and honest conversation explores Judge Perry’s experience with helping people at their most vulnerable moments, the tension between protecting individual rights of patients and ensuring that they are not a threat to themselves or others, and the procedure for carrying this out. We hope that this discussion can shed some light on a legal process that affects thousands of New Yorkers every year.
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Want to learn more about practice in New York’s mental hygiene courts? You can access the City Bar’s on-demand CLE program "Better Served by Treatment": Practicing in the Mental Health Courts 101: https://bit.ly/452oUXY Visit nycbar.org/events to find all of the most up-to-date information about our upcoming CLE programs and events as well as on-demand CLE content.

Compassionate Justice: Exploring the Little-Known World of Mental Hygiene Proceedings with Hon. W. Frank Perry III

New York City Bar Association