A class-action lawsuit regarding the rights of psychiatric patients being held involuntarily in emergency rooms will be allowed to proceed through the federal courts, according to a ruling Tuesday afternoon.
The suit accuses the N.H Department of Health and Human Services of being too slow to provide judicial hearings for patients who have been involuntarily held for mental health reasons. Keeping people in emergency rooms without a timely hearing is a violation of their constitutional rights, the lawsuit argues. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit allowed the case to go forward after lower courts denied two motions to dismiss in April and December 2020 – the second of which state lawyers appealed.
Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director at the ACLU of New Hampshire, said Tuesday’s decision solidified what he and others have argued for the past three years.
“People have a right to seek relief when the state boards them in hospital emergency rooms without a timely hearing or access to counsel in violation of their federal constitutional rights,” he said.
In a similar case earlier this year, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that patients in a mental health crisis can no longer be involuntarily committed in emergency rooms without being offered a probable cause hearing within three days of their confinement.
Often in New Hampshire, people deemed to be in crisis must wait days or weeks in the emergency rooms for a bed in one of the state’s psychiatric facilities to open up without an opportunity to challenge the involuntary admission.
The plaintiff in the case, a woman identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, says she was involuntarily held at the emergency department of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center for two weeks before she was transferred to the New Hampshire Hospital in Concord and received a probable cause hearing after 17 days of confinement, not including weekends or holidays. Under New Hampshire law, involuntarily committed patients are entitled to a hearing within three days of being admitted.
The case rested on whether the three-day countdown starts when the patient reaches New Hampshire Hospital, as the state argued, or when they are confined in an emergency room and enter the “state mental health services system.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s May ruling, Bissonnette said emergency room boarding is still happening in New Hampshire.
“Just yesterday, 18 individuals were waiting for mental health treatment in hospital emergency rooms,” he said. “We will continue to combat this practice in federal court…”