John Petrila, JD

John Petrila was a member of the founding Board of the Policy Institute and is a committed member of our team. He is an attorney with 40 years of experience in mental health law and policy. Before joining MMHPI, he chaired the Department of Health Policy & Management at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. Prior to that he chaired the Department of Mental Health Law & Policy at the Florida Mental Health Institute where he built a department that worked extensively with administrative data to inform policy at the county and state level. He also was the first Director of Forensic Services in the Missouri Department of Mental Health and was Chief Counsel and Deputy Commissioner in the New York State Office of Mental Health.

He received his law degree and an advanced degree in mental health law from the University of Virginia School of Law. He is a national expert on data sharing and wrote the chapter on confidentiality for the 1999 Surgeon General’s report on mental health. He was a member of the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mandated Community Treatment and is past President of the International Association of Forensic Mental Health Services. In 2011 he was named a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands and taught and conducted research at the Forensic Psychology Program at Maastricht University.