{"id":113550,"date":"2020-11-17T06:06:04","date_gmt":"2020-11-17T03:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/city-hall-needs-to-make-mentally-ill-street-menaces-top-priority\/"},"modified":"2020-11-17T06:06:04","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T03:06:04","slug":"city-hall-needs-to-make-mentally-ill-street-menaces-top-priority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/city-hall-needs-to-make-mentally-ill-street-menaces-top-priority\/","title":{"rendered":"#City Hall needs to make mentally ill street menaces top priority"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#City Hall needs to make mentally ill street menaces top priority<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n One year ago, the \u201cChinatown murders\u201d led coverage in New York news<\/a>papers. Four homeless men were beaten to death one night in early October 2019, allegedly by a man with mental illness and a long experience cycling through the homelessness and criminal-justice systems.<\/p>\n

It was tragic and outrageous. Yet a year later, nothing has changed.<\/p>\n

This past weekend, Marquis Ventura, a New Yorker with rocky psychiatric and criminal-justice histories, was arraigned on charges that he randomly assaulted actor Rick Moranis in early October.<\/p>\n

Joshua Diaz, another mentally ill man with a lengthy rap sheet, was arrested last month and is suspected of pushing a New Jersey woman off a subway platform.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers are so inured to evidence of mental-health dysfunction that they\u2019re probably unaware of just how many advantages the city has on that front. As my late colleague DJ Jaffe used to say, \u201cOn paper, New York has the best mental- health-care system in the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has wealth. The city raised (pre-COVID) more than $13 billion in income taxes annually, about half of which came from the 70,000 or so filers earning $500,000 or more.<\/p>\n

These funds and others from many additional revenue sources support a wide range of \u201ccommunity services\u201d that advocates always argue are key to stabilizing the mentally ill.<\/p>\n

To divert mentally ill people from jail, New York has one of the most robust networks of alternatives to incarceration programs of any city in the nation.<\/p>\n

Mayor de Blasio\u2019s 15,000-unit supportive housing initiative is the largest such effort in US history, breaking the previous record set by Mayor Mike Bloomberg\u2019s 9,000-unit \u201cNew York\/New York III\u201d supportive housing program.<\/p>\n

It has expertise. While more than 1,000 counties in America don\u2019t have one psychiatrist, New York, and Manhattan in particular, always ranks at or near the top in psychiatrists per capita rankings.<\/p>\n

It has public engagement. Though mental-health issues barely rank in federal elections, in a city where \u201cquality of life\u201d concerns regularly poll at the top of public surveys, mental-health reform has more of a \u201chad me at hello\u201d character for New York politicians.<\/p>\n

The main problem is that all that wealth, expertise and engagement counts for little when so much of our government\u2019s focus is devoted to the \u201cworried well,\u201d and not schizophrenic homeless men disposed to punching random strangers.<\/p>\n

Genuinely troubled mentally ill individuals represent a minority of New Yorkers who report experiencing some sort of \u201cmental disorder.\u201d But they drive most of the public concern.<\/p>\n

In that respect, de Blasio\u2019s ThriveNYC program hasn\u2019t just been a failure, it\u2019s been counterproductive. Most of the criticism of Thrive focused on waste and vagueness. No doubt, Thrive achieved remarkably little for a program costing more than $850 million, in large measure because of no clear conception of what it was trying to achieve.<\/p>\n

But one clear goal of Thrive\u2019s architects was to convince as many New Yorkers as possible that having a mental disorder is no big deal because it happ<\/a>ens to practically everyone. To the extent they succeeded, they set back the cause of mental-health \u00adreform.<\/p>\n

Believing that everyone needs help leads to the diffusion of scarce resources and reduces acceptance of the reality that rare problems merit unusual interventions. Involuntary treatment not only is sometimes necessary, it\u2019s the most compassionate action.<\/p>\n

COVID hasn\u2019t made anything easier. As The Wall Street Journal reported last month, many of New York\u2019s already-scarce psychiatric care beds were converted to prepare for a hospitalization surge. The current uptick in infections and hospitalizations is bad news for anyone eager to restore those beds for psychiatric care as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

On mental health, New York\u2019s just as up against it as it ever was. The task ahead, for the next mayor, is to reverse the mistakes of the Thrive era, work to build back in-patient bed capacity, and expand supervisory options for the mentally ill. We\u2019re not getting a vaccine anytime soon for the madness in the streets.<\/p>\n

Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.\u00a0<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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“#City Hall needs to make mentally ill street menaces top priority” One year ago, the \u201cChinatown murders\u201d led coverage in New York newspapers. Four homeless men were beaten to death one night in early October 2019, allegedly by a man with mental illness and a long experience cycling through the homelessness and criminal-justice systems. It…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/bill-de-blasio-5.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[80159,5042,70989,71431,71067],"class_list":["post-113550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-16-20","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-mental-health","tag-mental-illness","tag-thrivenyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}