Debate on how to treat New Yorkers with mental illness

Police were called in January 2022 to the Upper West Side because Alex Brass was thought to be suicidal.

They took him to the hospital involuntarily and spent three weeks there.

“I didn’t feel like I was humanized at all and I left with such a distrust for doctors, for the system,” Brass told NY1.

Under the Adams administration, the city is trying to step up the number of people involuntarily removed from the streets and subways to address a mental health crisis in the five boroughs.

It’s seen as even more pressing by the mayor after last week’s serial stabbings. Ramon Rivera, a homeless man, is charged with the crimes.

“You have three New Yorkers that are murdered,” the mayor said during his weekly question-and-answer session with reporters Tuesday. “No one can say they are doing enough.”

New numbers from the city show the NYPD involuntarily removed 126 people on average on a weekly basis from January through October.

The city could not say how many of those people were removed more than once during that time period. While they have several lists of high priority people chronically homeless with serious mental illness that they do track, NY1 was told the alleged killer in last week’s stabbings was not on those lists.

The city also does not track all people they forcibly remove.

“I am not at liberty to discuss information about a particular situation or a particular case,” Brian Stettin, the mayor’s senior adviser on severe mental illness, said. “I will say generally we have a crisis in this city of people who have severe mental illness who are very well known to our mental health system and our criminal justice system who we need to be doing a whole lot more to get the help and care that they need.”

In the aftermath of last week’s murders, the mayor and Stettin are once again pushing a piece of legislation in Albany to broaden the criteria for involuntarily hospitalizing someone in a mental health crisis. It would no longer just be an imminent danger to oneself or others, but include other standards like the inability to care for one’s basic needs.