54 seriously mentally ill people have been taken off the streets, Adams said

Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday that New York City has made progress in helping homeless people with serious mental illness access treatment and housing.

The mayor has made tackling mental illness a priority after a series of random, high-profile attacks involving homeless people. On Wednesday, a year after announcing a plan to involuntarily hospitalize mentally ill homeless people who appeared unable to care for themselves, he said at a news conference that the city was seeing results.

“We promised New Yorkers that the days of ignoring the mental health crisis unfolding on our streets are over,” Mr. Adams said. “We will not abandon New Yorkers in need.”

The mayor said the city has involuntarily hospitalized an average of 137 homeless mentally ill people per week since May. It was unclear how many of the people were admitted to hospitals or discharged shortly afterwards.

The mayor also said the government had targeted 100 homeless people who were seriously mentally ill and resistant to treatment. Since November of last year, 54 of them have been placed in homes or hospitals, city officials said — a significant increase from the year before, when only 22 people on that list were taken off the streets.

Brian Stettin, the mayor’s senior adviser on serious mental illness, said the government “did everything and used all the resources at our disposal.”

The announcement came a week after a New York Times investigation found widespread deficiencies in the city’s mental health system — homeless shelters, hospitals, specialized treatment teams and other organizations — in caring for some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers. The disruptions preceded 94 acts of violence in the past decade, The Times found.

The investigation found that the city had not placed mentally ill people in dedicated mental health shelters where they could receive psychiatric support and services. Hospitals often discharged patients in crisis before they were stable. And workers on specialized treatment teams were often overloaded, undertrained, and underpaid, sometimes failing to intervene before violently dispersing homeless people.

Many of the errors are due to poor communication between the various agencies responsible for treating mentally ill homeless people.

The disruptions were not new. Generations of mayors and government officials have struggled to adequately address the mental health crisis since the 1970s, The Times found.

Mr Adams said his government had tackled the problem head-on. Officials were working with the city’s public hospital system to help coordinate care, and they said they expected to bring back psychiatric beds that had been repurposed during the pandemic. They also urged private hospitals, which have made significant cuts in psychiatric beds in recent years, to increase treatment of homeless mentally ill people.

Since 2019, the city has tracked some of the hardest-to-treat homeless mentally ill people on an informal list it calls the “top 50” list. The Adams administration has convened a task force of agencies and nonprofits that meets weekly to help those on the list.

But of the mentally ill homeless people whose cases were investigated by The Times, only one — Jordan Neely — was on the city’s list. Earlier this year, Mr Neely behaved erratically on the subway when he was strangled by another passenger who said he feared for his safety.

“Our goal is to catch the Jordans at the beginning of the process, give him or her services that they deserve, give them community, give them care, give them support and whatever medical intervention we can do,” said Mr. Adams. He added that this intensive coordination had been successful for a small group of people and needed to be expanded.

Mr. Adams also cited the success of outreach workers who convinced thousands of people to leave the streets and subways and go to shelters. The city has spent more than $1 billion in recent years creating specialized mental health shelters where people can meet with psychiatrists and receive support. But The Times found that many newcomers were never placed in those shelters because workers did not have access to their psychiatric histories, and the homeless did not disclose them.

On Wednesday, Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park said people have the right not to disclose their psychiatric history, adding: “We are not a medical system.”

City officials said they had moved more than 1,000 people living in shelters into permanent housing as of this summer.

But given the challenges, Mr. Adams said repairing the mental health system required help from state lawmakers.

He has urged lawmakers to broaden New York’s legal standard for when someone with a mental illness can be hospitalized against their will, saying the current law has been interpreted too narrowly.

The administration also supports a bill that would require hospitals to work with outpatient providers and screen psychiatric patients to determine their eligibility for court-ordered outpatient treatment. The proposal, introduced this year, has not passed out of the General Assembly and has no sponsor in the Senate.