I was heartbroken by what I saw as I walked through Penn Station on Monday night: some 200 people taking shelter in the transit system; individuals suffering from mental illness; adults and families unprotected from the cold or the pandemic. A handful of police officers were on hand, but no city social workers or mental health professionals to provide care or support.
I was heartbroken again Wednesday morning when I realized the “A-Train Ripper” has fallen out of the political conversation before we even addressed the underlying issue, or held Mayor Bill de Blasio accountable.
Rigoberto Lopez, 21, was arrested Sunday on murder and attempted murder charges. He had four prior arrests and had been identified by the NYPD as someone with emotional distress at least twice before the recent attacks. Asked this morning at his daily press conference why Lopez was not being assisted by city agencies, Mayor de Blasio said “the situation did not sound the kind of alarms that we have seen in some other cases where someone was clearly diagnosed with mental health issues, not just indicated by an individual officer.”
The underlying issue that caused this tragedy is not the number of police officers assigned to the subway, which appropriately grew by 500 in the wake of underground attacks, nor is it the easily scapegoated bail reform policies. The issue is the mental health pandemic in New York City that has been exacerbated by Covid-19 but has for decades deeply permeated New York’s homeless and incarcerated populations, many of whom have underlying serious mental illness. It is unreasonable to expect police officers to do the work of social workers. Despite commitments from the mayor to dispatch mental health and medical experts along with police officers, the NYPD, nonprofit organizations, and volunteers are going at it alone.
Over the last few years, more than $1 billion has been spent under the ThriveNYC banner, with little transparency — and most shockingly, without adequately addressing serious mental illness or mental health among the homeless and incarcerated. “Street homelessness,” the most acute state of homelessness, continues unabated despite more than $3 billion in city spending annually, a number that has ballooned under Mayor de Blasio.
New York City has approximately 4,000 street homeless among a total homeless population of more than 60,000. Studies show that the large majority of street homeless New Yorkers are people living with mental illness or other severe health problems, and that one-third of the overall homeless individuals live with mental illness. Despite the overall population of city jails decreasing, the average number of incarcerated individuals with mental health problems has increased more than 40 percent over the last decade, and the cost of providing correctional health services grew from $197 million in fiscal year 2010 to nearly $347 million in 2020.
When I returned home from the Iraq war in 2005 I began to see my fellow veterans struggling with PTSD and other mental health issues that lead to suicide, homelessness, and incarceration. They were largely unable to unlock the help they needed from the bureaucracy of the Veterans Administration. I was discharged in 2007 and within a few years lost more of my fellow Marines to suicide than I had to combat. That’s why I founded Headstrong in 2012, one of the leading providers of mental healthcare in the country — a no-cost, no-paperwork program that gets vulnerable veterans the care they need, at the moment they need it. We provide services to 1,800 people in 25 cities at a cost of $5,000 per person for six months of treatment.
Mental health is one of the most critical issues we face, touching every aspect of our lives — and the solutions must be deeply collaborative. The pandemic has us all confronting grief, isolation, anxiety, depression, economic crisis — and struggling to get exercise, spend time in parks and open space, and connect with friends, family, and neighbors to alleviate the impacts. Our children are suffering particularly with little agency to help themselves. The disparity is particularly clear in communities of color, among low-income individuals and families, and within our homeless and at-risk-of-homelessness population.
To break the stigma associated with both treating our mental health and confronting serious mental illness, we need to provide access to services at a granular level, starting with how we interact with one another. It requires building trust on an individual basis. Many New Yorkers do not trust hospitals or health institutions. Adding to the distrust: the mental healthcare sector lacks diversity. Only 4% of licensed psychologists in the U.S. are Black, 5% Hispanic, and 5% Asian. Patients must see themselves reflected in their healthcare providers.
There are so many great organizations and heroic individuals working to connect the dots for New Yorkers to address our mental health and wellbeing — and serve us when we need more acute help. Surging police officers into our subways is a too little, too late band-aid that we all know could create tragic new outcomes.
