Treatment after diagnosis
The Adams administration’s new mental health blueprint appropriately targets areas that are in true crisis: youth mental health, drug dependency and the general lack of available treatment options for New Yorkers with serious mental conditions. Particular commendations should be directed at funding for overdose prevention centers to operate at all hours, along with an effort to expand this proven solution across the city, and using schools to help intervene in the escalating nationwide student mental health crisis driven by the pandemic and other factors.
The real questions here are not about the goals, which are unobjectionable, but the execution. We all remember the last time a mayor flashily rolled out a mental health initiative. Bill de Blasio’s ThriveNYC program had similarly laudable objectives, and would have been a legacy-cementing achievement had it actually achieved them.
In the end, the de Blasio administration infamously had a hard time even determining whether it had failed or succeeded on account of its failure to properly keep track of results. Despite somewhat cagey data sharing around the Adams flagship policies thus far, it is refreshingly committing to transparency on granular data, particularly when it comes to some of the less-tried-and-true plans here.
We do know that overdose prevention works and how to do it, but the waters around treating teen mental health with new tools like tele-health at a time when it has deteriorated so rapidly are less charted. This means we should keep a careful eye on metrics like how many students are able to access care and whether that seems to be bringing down crises resulting in hospitalization, violence and suicidal ideation, for example.
Of course, there are also questions of pure logistics, including the capacity to provide care in the first place, which the report identifies. It’s unfeasible to pile more responsibilities on a city workforce that’s already burnt out and depleted, so staffing up should be a priority, with an emphasis on schools — the most direct way to intervene in teens’ lives — and qualified mental health practitioners.