The mental-health debate is characterized by much flailing and minimal focus. There’s no lack of coverage of problems such as youth anxiety. But little progress is made for the people who need our help the most: The mentally ill living on our streets.
When Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ThriveNYC initiative collapsed under a storm of criticism — a debacle so notorious that even sports radio hosts could be heard mocking it — many hoped that a lesson was learned about the need to target resources to the seriously mentally ill.
But we lost focus again, and one reason was COVID. Criticism of the lockdowns’ mental-health harms for the general population had the unintended consequence of diverting attention to mental health in general.
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
Carolyn Gorman is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former board member of Mental Illness Policy Org.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post