Sanity in sight: Mayor Adams enlists Albany to improve mental health services for those with serious psychological problems
The New York Daily NewsNov 30, 2022
It’s not our collective imagination: Large numbers of deeply unstable New Yorkers are inhabiting the streets and subways. A small fraction of those beset with psychosis —
Chronically, such individuals fall through gaping cracks in the mental health infrastructure. Police and the jails remain frontline responders to their complex conditions, which frequently include a symptom called anosognosia, which means they are unaware of their own illness and therefore uninterested in seeking treatment.
At long last, after glaring failures by
Top of the list is a state legislative push to make clear that a person requires inpatient care when a mental condition prevents them from meeting their own basic needs; to require hospitals to consider a number of factors before discharging people to prevent them from simply cycling through from street to hospital and back; and to require providers to tell nonprofit groups when their clients are being released, so a safety net is waiting to catch them.
Once a patient is set for discharge,
Amen. This may appear to be an intractable problem, but progress is within reach. Don’t fail the suffering and the city yet again.
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