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Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday that New York City had made progress in helping homeless people who are severely mentally ill get connected to treatment and housing. The mayor has made addressing 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 to be unable to care for themselves, he said at a news conference that the city was seeing results. “We made a commitment to New Yorkers that the days of ignoring the mental health crisis playing out on our streets were over,” Mr. Adams said. “We will not abandon New Yorkers in need.”The mayor said the city had, on average, involuntarily hospitalized 137 homeless mentally ill people a week since May.

Persons: Eric Adams, Mr, Adams, “ Organizations: New Locations: New York City

The city’s homeless shelter system often places newcomers in the wrong settings. It includes 37 dedicated mental health shelters that are staffed with psychiatrists and social workers to offer treatment — at a cost to taxpayers of about $250 million a year. The system relies on low-paid workers who lack the mental health training and tools to identify psychiatric issues in newcomers. One in four people with severe mental illness in the shelter system were not placed in a mental health shelter, state auditors found in 2022. One 41-year-old man who should have been placed in a mental health shelter was instead shuttled to other types of shelters as his mental health deteriorated.

Organizations: Times Locations: New York State, York, Union Square

For years, the New York State Office of Mental Health has maintained a detailed database for sharing the psychiatric histories of people who rely on the social safety net — a tool that, when used correctly, can ensure the state’s most vulnerable people receive adequate care. But the database, known as PSYCKES, was not consistently used by one of the most crucial pieces of that safety net: hospitals, which have sometimes discharged homeless mentally ill people without using the tool to communicate with shelters and care teams that provide outpatient treatment. In some cases, those discharges preceded subway shovings and other random acts of violence by the homeless people after their illnesses went untreated. The state issued the guidance late last month after receiving questions from The New York Times, which was preparing to publish an investigation that revealed preventable institutional breakdowns of homeless shelters, hospitals, specialized treatment teams and other organizations. The breakdowns preceded more than 90 acts of violence in the past decade, The Times found.

Organizations: New York State, of Mental Health, The New York Times, Times

Times reporters spent more than a year examining how often homeless mentally ill people under the care of the city have committed acts of violence. The lack of public information about the incidents made it difficult to evaluate about a quarter of the cases. Still, the examination identified 94 instances in the past decade in which breakdowns of the city’s social safety net preceded the violence, sometimes by just days or hours. A 23-year-old whose outpatient treatment team stood by as he became increasingly violent, doing little to intervene. Taken together, the 94 cases offer the fullest picture yet of how, where and why the safety net has broken down.

Persons: Michelle Go Organizations: Times, The Times

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