What Allegheny County’s new court-ordered mental health treatment program can and can’t do

Courts in the Pittsburgh area have a new option for people in mental health crisis: ordering treatment instead of jail or hospitalization. Allegheny County is now one of only six Pennsylvania counties running an assisted outpatient treatment program, in which a judge can approve a care plan lasting up to ninety days, monitored by a coordinator, with no criminal penalty for missing appointments alone. The Conversation US reports that the harder question is capacity. In a University of Pittsburgh study, two hundred seventy-nine local providers were listed as accepting adult Medicaid, but only thirty-four had appointments available, roughly one in eight, and more than half of patient calls went unreturned. Similar laws in California and New York have been linked to fewer hospitalizations and arrests, though state audits in both places found people cycling through crises without ever being connected to ongoing care. Whether the Allegheny program delivers may depend less on the court order itself than on whether the services it calls for actually exist.

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