Addressing Mental Illness: Long-Overdue Task for Pols
Nicole Gelinas’ column on the city’s failure to treat the mentally ill after the murder of an EMT.
Nicole Gelinas’ column is a bullseye, laying out how we fix this self-imposed insanity (“No pass for ‘mentally ill,’ ” Oct. 1).
The Post and other papers in this city, chock full of investigative journalists, need to expose the chain of command and accountability in our mental-health system.
Our ineffective mayor needs to explain who he will excoriate to do the jobs they are paid to perform. His grace period has expired.
The mental-health system in the city is run by people who don’t care about how the system performs, only that they get their paychecks.
Nicon Zasorin Claverack
There should be no pass for the psychotic person who allegedly assassinated one of New York’s finest. He should get life in prison. No more excuses.
Shame on our city and shame on the powers that be who let these assassins slide. Where will this all end if not now?
Justice for Lt. Alison Russo-Elling. Prayers of strength for her family.
Donna Skjeveland Ronkonkoma
We have yet another senseless murder — this time of EMT Alison Russo-Elling — at the hands of a mentally ill man. Something’s got to give.
If someone is homeless, mentally ill but not a particular danger, retrofit the old state hospitals as SROs or “tiny houses” with services. If someone is mentally ill and dangerous, they need to be in a hospital, not a jail, as it only makes them worse and more dangerous.
Open up more acute beds but, more important, long-term care beds in some of the abandoned psychiatric hospitals. In addition, make the enforcement of Kendra’s Law a simpler process.
I’ve been a psychiatric nurse for 51 years and a former director of psychiatric nursing at Bellevue Hospital. I’m sure I’m not the only mental-health professional who believes this way.
This is good mentalhealth policy. We must treat the seriously mentally ill safely and compassionately but in an appropriate setting.
Laura Logue Rood Manhattan
Gelinas has written an excellent column on how “mentally ill” murderers are free to roam New York City streets unchecked, enabled and emboldened to freely attack and kill innocent citizens.
When will all these murders stop and when will the authorities stop the murderers?
Current mental-health protocols seem ineffective. Politicians and the laws they enact seem ineffective. New York: How about becoming a lawand-order state?
Jack Ridolph The Villages