One crazy system

My sister has been failed by the system that’s supposed to help her.” So said Nancy Egegbara, wisely diagnosing the massive cracks through which Anthonia Egegbara fell before her untreated mental illness took hold of her and she shoved Lenny Javier into a No. 1 train Monday morning. Egegbara is rightly charged with attempted murder and assault for the horrifying push and rightly being held on $100,000 bail — but the demons in her head were so so wrongly allowed to fester year after year, the umpteenth example that New York has become a city where people in psychological distress routinely see their conditions metastasize, endangering themselves and others.

Often in the wake of such a tragedy, reporters are forced to search for clues that a suspect has diagnosed mental illness, given that federal health-privacy law zealously guards such information. In this case, Egegbara’s family put it plainly, saying that she has schizophrenia, for which she has been hospitalized more than 50 times since her teenage years. When swallowing her pills, she’s considerate to others. When off, the results can be catastrophic. And since she’s an adult, they say, no one can make her stay on her meds.

Except that New York has for 22 years had a law designed to try to solve precisely this problem. Kendra’s Law is named after a woman killed in subway push by a schizophrenic man who refused to take his medication.

Tragically, rather than preserve or add beds for people who might need or be ordered into treatment, New York State has eviscerated those services. Kendra’s Law has been invoked too sparingly, falling from 1,600 people under court order to follow their treatment plan in 2017 to 1,400 today. And New York City has rolled nearly a billion dollars a year into a suite of mental-health programs, ThriveNYC, hardly any of which focus on helping those beset by the most crippling conditions.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This is insanity.