Number of facilities to help mentally ill to be tripled: mayor

New York City will triple the number of “clubhouses” for people with severe mental health issues and create a new virtual mental health care service for teens under a new policy, Mayor Adams said Thursday.

The expansion of clubhouses — which connect people with severe mental illness with jobs, education and structure — is a key part of a three-pronged plan that will also focus on strengthening harm reduction programs to better address the crisis in overdose deaths that’s plagued the city in recent years.

Adams framed the initiatives against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic, which further exacerbated problems for people dealing with mental health challenges.

“We realize that this mental health crisis started long before the pandemic,” he noted. “The change begins with us now.”

Critics were quick to pan Adams’ new plan, though. Dave Giffen, executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, said it lacked “detail and ambition.”

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams expressed relief that it “centers support over enforcement, as opposed to strategies put forward in the past,” but noted that each part of the plan “comes with concerns about implementation.”

An overarching goal of the plan, which was first reported in Politico last week, will be to reduce overdose deaths by 15% over the next four years.

Adams alluded to the fact that the city saw the most overdoses on record in 2021 — nearly 2,700 — and said the city must “ramp up” efforts to prevent fatal ODs. As he has in the past, he singled out fentanyl as particularly concerning.

“Our city must be a place where substance use does not lead to death, but can be treated and overcome.”

To help combat overdose deaths — many of which are a result of other drugs laced with fentanyl — Adams said he’d expand “drug-checking” services and create public health vending machines to distribute naloxone, which is used to reverse the effects of an overdose.

The new initiatives will be paid for with $20 million in “new commitments” and builds on $370 million in separate funding from the city, according to Adams.

The mayor also said implementing the new policies would rely on federal and state aid, though he did not put an exact dollar amount on how much money he hopes to get from them.

The new plan will also include mental telehealth services for teens. The city’s Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan noted that the rate of suicidal ideation among teen girls is higher now than it has been in decades.

Before joining the Adams’ administration, Vasan served as CEO at the non-profit Fountain House, which helped developed the use of clubhouses to address severe mental health issues.

Vasan said Thursday that one of the primary reasons he signed up for his current job was the emphasis the mayor wanted to see placed on mental health and noted that the alarming rate of overdose deaths in the city is inextricably linked to mental illness.