Kendra's Law: Background information when reading While the City Slept

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

While the City Slept

A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness

by Eli Sanders

While the City Slept by Eli Sanders X
While the City Slept by Eli Sanders
  • Critics' Opinion:

    Readers' Opinion:

     Not Yet Rated
  • First Published:
    Feb 2016, 336 pages

    Paperback:
    Feb 2017, 336 pages

    Genres

  • Rate this book


Book Reviewed by:
James Broderick
Buy This Book

About this Book

Kendra's Law

This article relates to While the City Slept

Print Review

While the City Slept is a searing indictment of the mental health system in the United States, showing step-by-step how the failure of an overworked, underfunded bureaucracy led to a likely preventable human tragedy.

Mental Health Among the many challenges communities face is in ensuring that those experiencing mental illness get proper treatment. In most states, merely presenting symptoms is not enough. In fact, more often than not, unless the person has demonstrated violent behavior, nothing can be done to compel treatment. However, in 1999, New York State lawmakers approved "Kendra's Law," which has since been hailed by many professionals as a breakthrough in the way states administer mental health services.

Kendra's Law – named after Kendra Webdale, a 32-year-old woman who was pushed to her death in front of a New York City subway train in 1999 by a schizophrenic man who was not taking medication for his condition – allows judges to order certain mentally ill individuals to accept outpatient treatment and monitoring if they wish to remain at large in the community. If the individual declines, or fails to follow the court-ordered protocol, he or she can then be involuntarily committed to a mental health facility.

In addition to passing the law, New York state legislators also voted to increase funding for the state's mental health services – a two-pronged approach that helps people and saves money, argues Eli Sanders in While the City Slept:

Uniquely, the New York law also commits the state to funding better community treatment, so that people can be prevented from deteriorating in the first place, when possible, and then, when necessary, effectively handled through outpatient commitment. This system…has proven, so far, to be a money saver for New York taxpayers. Bouncing people around to various parts of the system, and then eventually incarcerating them is, it turns out, more expensive.

In a 2009 report, the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national non-profit devoted to eliminating barriers for access to timely and effective mental health treatment, compiled the results of separate studies on Kendra's law and found that it has been highly successful in achieving its aim of ensuring that those most in need, get treatment before they become a danger to themselves and others. The law "drastically reduces hospitalization, homelessness, arrest, and incarceration among people with severe psychiatric disorders, while increasing adherence to treatment and overall quality of life," the report states.

The law does have its critics, including the New York Civil Liberties Union and various psychiatric organizations, some of whom oppose the part that allows the court to involuntarily commit patients who don't follow the prescribed protocol. As one prominent psychologist has argued, "Forced treatment for people with mental illness has had a long and abusive history, both here in the United States and throughout the world (read our related 'Beyond the Book' about controversial psychiatric practices). No other medical specialty has the rights psychiatry and psychology do to take away a person's freedom in order to help `treat' that person."

But as Sanders notes in his book, if Washington State had such a law on its books in 2009 "three families, and the wide circle of humanity they intersected with, might have been spared tremendous anguish."

Picture from Deposit Photos

Filed under Society and Politics

Article by James Broderick

This "beyond the book article" relates to While the City Slept. It originally ran in March 2016 and has been updated for the February 2017 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access become a member today.
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Join BookBrowse

For a year of great reading
about exceptional books!

Find out more


Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Golden Gate
    The Golden Gate
    by Amy Chua
    The Golden Gate is a highly entertaining page-turner that falls neatly into, but in some ways ...
  • Book Jacket: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel
    The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel
    by Douglas Brunt
    Rudolf Diesel ought to be a household name. Like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Nikola Tesla, Diesel ...
  • Book Jacket: Move Like Water
    Move Like Water
    by Hannah Stowe
    As a child growing up on the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales, Hannah Stowe always loved the sea, ...
  • Book Jacket
    Loved and Missed
    by Susie Boyt
    London-based author and theater director Susie Boyt has written seven novels and the PEN Ackerley ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
Fair Rosaline
by Natasha Solomons
A subversive, powerful untelling of Romeo and Juliet by New York Times bestselling author Natasha Solomons.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Alfie and Me
    by Carl Safina

    A moving account of raising, then freeing, an orphaned screech owl. Three starred reviews!

  • Book Jacket

    All You Have to Do Is Call
    by Kerri Maher

    An inspiring novel based on the true story of the Jane Collective and the brave women who fought for our right to choose.

Who Said...

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

G O T P, B The P, F T P

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.