Patient to advocate: Kathy Flaherty on law, lived experience and mental health

CT Examiner – Monday, February 16, 2026
By Amy Wu

Kathy Flaherty slowly sips coffee at Perkatory Coffee in downtown Middletown, not far from her office at Connecticut Valley Hospital.

Flaherty’s low-key and unassuming demeanor belies her prominence as a leading mental health policy advocate. As the executive director of Connecticut Legal Rights Project Inc., she has represented mental health patients who are fighting forced electroshock therapy.

Many cases are Superior Court appeals of probate court orders where clients don’t want the treatment. She has testified at public hearings on legislation related to electroshock, opposing forced treatment and arguing it undermines informed consent.

At the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, Flaherty leads a team of eight attorneys, a legal advocate and three paralegals. The statewide nonprofit agency provides legal services to low-income individuals on matters from housing to probate court. The organization was founded in 1989 after a federal consent decree required Connecticut to provide independent legal representation to people confined in state-run psychiatric facilities.

Flaherty’s legislative advocacy and work were driven by her own mental health challenges. In college, she was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. During her first year at Harvard Law School, she was involuntarily committed to McLean Hospital, a prominent psychiatric hospital outside of downtown Boston.

“The reason I was attracted to this work was because of my own personal experience as a patient within the mental health system. I was civilly committed to a psychiatric hospital my first year of law school,” she said.

Flaherty had voluntary electroshock therapy.

“At the Capitol, I am not just an uninterested advocate, I’ve had some of these experiences myself,” she said. “It’s a system I’ve been in and out of over the years and I’ve experienced some of the difficulties of the involuntary treatment and not being heard and listened to. That’s why it’s so important to me.”

A Connecticut native, Flaherty was raised in Newington and is adopted. Her father worked as a dental technician and her mother as a bookkeeper. She said mental illness runs in her biological family, but not in her adoptive one.

She suspects that as a youth she suffered from mental illness, but this was not addressed in part, she said, because she is a child of the 1970s.

“In reality, I was depressed and anxious my entire youth, but nobody cared because it was the ’70s. There just wasn’t the emphasis on kids’ mental health that there is now,” she said.

“I think this is based on my personal experience. The job you have as a kid is going to school and I did that really well,” she said. “In retrospect there were struggles that were there and they went unaddressed because I was able to function.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at Wellesley College.

Involuntary and voluntary treatment
Flaherty’s experience with involuntary psychiatric treatment happened when she was a first-year student at Harvard Law School.

“I wasn’t doing what I needed to succeed as a law student, though I was voluntarily seeing the law school psychiatrist,” she said, noting that she’d been struggling with mental health prior to Harvard.

She declined a recommendation from the psychiatrist to be hospitalized.

The forced hospitalization happened right after she “told my resident assistant in my dorm that if she didn’t get off my back, I was going to jump off the roof of the law school library, which I had no intention of doing,” she recalls. “It was a very flippant remark, but I didn’t realize it.”

Flaherty spent the next 60 days at McLean Hospital. She took forced medical leave and returned to law school the following year with clarity that she wanted to be a public interest lawyer. She’s been open about her own struggles and wrote a piece about her experience with mental illness for the school newspaper The Harvard Law Record. Against the advice of law school advisors, she included her position as council of former patients at McLean Hospital when applying for jobs.

“If someone didn’t want to hire me because of my disability, I didn’t want that job,” she said.

One her biggest professional challenges was being admitted to the state bar. Although she had already been admitted to Massachusetts and New York bars, she had to wait for a year and a half and was conditionally admitted. For the next nine years, she had to report that she was taking her medication, as well as provide a doctor’s note twice a year confirming that she was taking her medications.

Her first job after graduating was as a staff attorney at the Statewide Legal Services of CT, Inc. a nonprofit that represents low-income people on civil and legal matters and offers a hotline program.

In 2005 during a suicidal period, she underwent six sessions of voluntary electroshock therapy.

“I was in a very depressed state, and I didn’t really care and nothing else seemed to be working,” she said, noting that it was hard to tell how effective it was. She doesn’t have a stance on electroshock nor does the Connecticut Legal Rights Project.

“At Connecticut Legal Rights Project, we don’t have an ideological position for or against it,” she said. “What we really care about is the client and what is the individual’s preference.”

Her personal stance on electroshock is, “if the person wants it and can consent to it, I think they should be accepting people’s voluntary consent and renewing that consent every 30 days.”

Despite her busy schedule, Flaherty is contributing to various mental health advocacy groups including the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Keep the Promise Coalition. She’s led peer support groups for Advocacy Unlimited, a nonprofit focused on holistic healing.

“It can be incredibly helpful to be in a place with people who may not have gone through exactly what you’ve gone through but have gone through an experience,” she said. “You reach that kind of mutual understanding of how we both move forward. Nobody has the same clone story.”

She has guest lectured at UConn’s law school and this semester returns to Yale University where she will lecture psychiatry residents on the “lived experience of the system.”

Ultimately, Flaherty said what keeps her going is being inspired by the ordinary people she represents.

“Our clients are the ones who are managing to live every day in a difficult environment,” she said.

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