Treatment Over Objection in New York Psychiatric Malpractice: Separating a Rivers Process Failure from a Clinical Departure

Stephan M. Carlson, MD, MBA, FAPA · Psychiatric Malpractice

When a patient is medicated against their will and something goes wrong, the case is often pleaded as ordinary malpractice. In New York it rarely is. The right to refuse antipsychotic medication is a constitutional liberty interest with its own judicial machinery, and the first job of a forensic review is to decide which failure the record actually shows. Two different failures hide inside one complaint A treatment-over-objection claim almost always contains two distinct theories that the parties tend to blur. One is procedural: the facility medicated over a competent patient's refusal without the authorization New York law requires. The other is clinical: even where authority to medicate ex

Most relevant service: Expert Witness IME