Council members pushed health officials on Monday with the long wait times faced by long wait New Yorkers with severe mental illness as they tried to register for teams that connect with treatment and housing.
“These are very important programs and we are trying to expand them,” said Councillor Shahana Hanif, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn.
Dr. H. Jean Wright II, 672 people currently waiting to be added to Caseload, one of the city’s intensive mobile treatment team, is the vice-chairman of the city’s Department of Mental Health, and the city council hears on Monday about the health budget.
These teams are designed to provide mental health and substance use treatment to people with temporary living conditions that interact routinely with mental health and criminal justice systems and have recently shown signs of unsafe behavior. Among other criteria.
A similarly assertive community treatment team has a waiting list of 682 people, Wright said.
These and other similar teams are run by nonprofits, but will receive city funding and the city’s health department serves as a single point of access to receive referrals from clinicians, families, homeless service providers and other sources, officials said.
Wright couldn’t say the time they normally need to wait to register with one of these teams after being referred for care, but said some of the people on the waiting list are already registered with the team and are waiting to transfer to someone close to where they reside.
He also said that he has been receiving care coordination from the city while he waits for people to register with the outreach team and is not prevented from connecting to other services while they wait.
Dr. Michelle Morse, Acting Urban Health Commissioner, stressed at the hearing that many people have already benefited from these programs. The city currently funds 38 intensive mobile treatment teams with an annual budget of $42 million, serving more than 1,000 people in 2024, she said.
The city council has yet to announce an official response to the mayor’s reserve budget. This includes detailed funding proposals. Vera Judicial Institute, which aims to reduce incarceration, I called the town It will increase the budget for our intensive mobile treatment team next year by approximately 50%.
However, increasing urban funding has allowed the intensive mobile treatment team to expand in recent years. and audit City Secretary Brad Lander, released last year, said the city’s health department should improve its monitoring and reporting results to prove it is worth the investment.
Some are looking at alternative ways to reduce your waitlist. The nonprofit for Community Living has used private funds to pilot a step-down program that attempts to help people move from intensive mobile treatments and assertive community treatment teams to less-than-prepared, intensive services. Speaker Adrian Adams told her City Report The city should also invest in this model.
As city council members are calling for the expansion of these and other community-based mental health programs, they are also calling for Mayor Eric Adams for being too focused on involuntary hospitalizations as an answer to the city’s mental health issues.
It’s new Policy Briefs Council members said the Adams administration has yet to provide sufficient data to show that existing efforts to bring people to hospitals against their will for psychiatric assessments have led to positive outcomes.
“People who are part of this analysis need to get out of the sterile environment of the city council room, and they do what we do, go to the subway system and see the population in need,” Mayor Adams said at a press conference Monday when asked about the city council overview. “We’ll meet those needs.”
In 2022, Adams issued new protocols to police and clinicians, expanding the standard for when someone should be unwillingly taken to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He said it should happen when someone shows signs of mental illness and appears unable to meet their basic needs.
Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul promote the standard to codify in state law.
