Not long ago, on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, I walked past a man in a black coat, who was hunched over, licking the sidewalk. He murmured to himself and passersby. For a moment, it occurred to me that he might be having a psychotic episode. Then I ducked into a deli, bought lunch, and headed to the office. Should I have called 911? Maybe. The thought didn’t linger long.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Recently, aboard an F train, en route to Brooklyn, I saw a young man reach both hands into his pants and start masturbating. He wore a dirty sweater that was pulled over his head, and his socks were halfway off his feet. There was a cup of coffee and a chicken bone under his seat. An older man with two FreshDirect bags loaded with clothes and takeout containers was stretched out nearby. The young man was crying, and the older man slept. Several straphangers were watching, but it was late at night, and no one seemed particularly interested or concerned. Later, I asked an inpatient psychiatrist at a local hospital about the incident. There was little I could’ve done, he said, adding that the young man likely would have wound up at a hospital sooner or later. Perhaps he had recently been discharged from one. More often than not, people experiencing acute mental distress in public places get picked up by the police or an ambulance and are taken to the emergency room. Sometimes they find their way to a hospital on their own. Other times, something awful happens first.
On Monday, May 1st, aboard an F train in Manhattan, a Black man named Jordan Neely started yelling. He shouted, “I want food!” He shouted, “I’m not taking no for an answer!” He shouted, “I’m ready to die!” And then Daniel Penny, a twenty-four-year-old Marine veteran, who is white, pinned Neely down and started to strangle him. A second man held Neely’s wrists. Another passenger filmed the incident on a cell phone. Others were calling 911. Penny had Neely in a choke hold—and Neely’s body went limp. Someone said, “He’ll be all right.” Three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. The train had pulled into the Broadway-Lafayette subway station. The doors had opened, and a few passengers drifted onto the platform, upstairs, into the spring afternoon. Belowground, a police officer wearing blue gloves began chest compressions. Neely was pronounced dead. The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.
The N.Y.P.D. questioned Penny, then released him. (His lawyers say that he was acting in self-defense.) “We don’t know exactly what happened here,” Mayor Eric Adams said, afterward. “We cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that.” Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said, “There’s consequences for behavior.” Was she talking about Neely, or the man who killed him?
Many locals knew Jordan Neely. He liked to hang out in Times Square, where he would perform, dressed up like Michael Jackson—the side slide, the crotch grab, and the moonwalk were his signature moves. Law-enforcement and public-health officials also knew him. He had been arrested more than forty times, mostly for petty offenses, such as loitering and trespassing. He had a history of mental illness, and that Monday afternoon he had reportedly been throwing garbage at other passengers. Reflecting on the incident, the inpatient psychiatrist, who has worked in hospitals in New York for more than fifteen years, told me, “A couple months ago, a mentally ill man threw a juice box at my kid in the subway at Union Square, where there was a police presence, and no one intervened. The man walked out of the station.” Neely was killed. “It’s just very strange, the arbitrariness of it,” he said.
The psychiatrist went on to tell me that Neely had been involuntarily hospitalized, at Bellevue, in 2021. Neely was admitted to the hospital’s forensic-psychiatry unit, on the nineteenth floor, where doctors and nurses treat patients who have been recently arrested, or incarcerated on Rikers Island. Then, like so many other patients, Neely walked out of the hospital and onto the street. For a while, he lived at a homeless shelter. Sometimes he stayed with his aunt Carolyn and her wife, Whitney, at their apartment in Washington Heights, near where he grew up. In January, the two moved upstate, and Neely decided not to go—he said that he didn’t want to burden them. In early April, outreach workers spotted him on the subway. He urinated in front of them and they called the police. Carolyn told the Post that she had tried for years to get judges and doctors to help. “The whole system just failed him,” she said. “He fell through the cracks.”
There are more than two hundred thousand residents of New York City living with severe mental illness; roughly five per cent of them are homeless. That’s thirteen thousand people with schizophrenia, major depressive and bipolar disorders, or other significant mental- or behavioral-health diagnoses, all of whom regularly spend the night at a shelter, in the subway, on the street. They’re the ones you recognize—the people whom, for the past fifty years, every mayor has either tried to help, harass, or hide from view. Rudy Giuliani’s cops were known to chase people out of midtown, forcing them into the Bronx and Queens. Michael Bloomberg largely avoided public initiatives that addressed mental illness. Bill de Blasio allocated almost a billion dollars for a mental-health plan, but it was criticized for failing to track outcomes or prioritize treatment for those who needed help the most.
Last November, Adams, citing a “crisis we see all around us,” announced at a press conference that homeless people with mental illness would be removed from the streets and the subways, against their will if necessary, by the police and other city employees. Advocates were outraged. Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a longtime friend of the Mayor, said, “Just because someone smells, because they haven’t had a shower for weeks, because they’re mumbling, because their clothes are disheveled, that doesn’t mean they’re a danger to themselves or others.” Rumors spread quickly. Were the police about to start rounding up people who simply appeared to be mentally ill? How many were going to be detained? Two weeks later, lawyers sought to halt the initiative. In a courtroom downtown, an attorney for the city, who was defending the Mayor’s plan, said, “As far as anyone in this room knows, the initiative hasn’t changed anything.” The judge asked, “So the purpose of the press conference was to do what?”
“To announce the fact that the Mayor is taking the initiative of providing further guidance to the agencies about what is permitted under current law so that they can take action to protect New Yorkers under circumstances that the law permits.”
Adams’s policy, in other words, was more of the same.
In 1987, Mayor Ed Koch announced a broad interpretation of New York state law that permitted him to hospitalize the “loonies” and “crazies” around town. In the decades since, police and E.M.S. workers have regularly transported homeless people with apparent mental illness to hospitals against their will. That’s just part of the job: violent crime, parking tickets, heart attacks, the unsheltered woman in a wheelchair at Penn Station who is taken to Bellevue every few months after creating a public disturbance. The man with four large black suitcases who is picked up for zigzagging through traffic in Brooklyn and sent to the psychiatric emergency room at Kings County Hospital. The woman with schizophrenia who believes that the French government bought a church on Fifth Avenue and granted her the legal right to live there. One E.M.T., who has worked on ambulance crews across the city for the past twenty years, told me, “If the person is out of their mind, if you can see the person is not all there, the police will call for us, and we’ll come and take them.” (In the course of reporting this article, I interviewed dozens of E.M.T.s, paramedics, police officers, nurses, social workers, emergency-room doctors, and inpatient psychiatrists, most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak openly about the people in their care.)
Here’s how it happens. An E.M.T. and her partner park the ambulance—cops call it “the bus”—and evaluate the scene for safety. Does the individual have a weapon? Where’s the nearest egress? Then she’ll put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves and make a cautious approach. She’ll say, “What’s going on today, sir?,” or “Ma’am, how are you feeling tonight?” The person might respond with a mumble, a shout, or the formality you’d expect in a job interview. Often, the person will say, “I don’t want to tell you my name,” so the E.M.T. will smile and offer her own. She’ll say, “You’re not in trouble. I just want to know why you’re standing in the middle of the road. Can you come with me to the sidewalk, please? I’m here to listen.” Or maybe the person is already ripping the hair from his head and trying to escape the encounter by tossing the E.M.T.’s stretcher into the street. In that case, a paramedic can use a cotton sling to tie the patient’s wrists to his ankles and inject a drug, such as the sedative midazolam or the anesthetic ketamine. But not every ambulance crew has a paramedic. One might be ten or twenty minutes out, so, in the meantime, the E.M.T., who isn’t allowed to inject those drugs, will have to get creative. “You want cake? You want cookies? You want a cigarette?” Lies and threats, carrots and sticks; anything to get them on their way to the nearest hospital. The E.M.T. told me, “I don’t want to use the word ‘manipulative,’ but you have to figure out a way to just fucking get them in the ambulance.”
At the hospital, the patient is evaluated by a team of nurses and doctors in the emergency department. In New York City, this happens seventy thousand times a year. A little more than half of these patients—the ones in the worst shape—are then taken to the psychiatric unit. The hospital’s job is to evaluate, stabilize, treat, discharge. Just as you don’t depart the I.C.U. while you’re having a stroke or bleeding out, you don’t leave the psychiatric unit while you’re in the throes of psychosis. Some people stay for months before being transferred to a state-run psychiatric hospital; others are discharged after only a few days, or are never admitted at all. Every day at Bellevue, the largest city-run hospital, there are usually about five or six patients downstairs, in the psychiatric emergency department, waiting for a bed. The average stay in the psychiatric unit is thirteen days. (One reason hospitals discharge people so quickly is that there are not enough inpatient psychiatric beds; high-quality psychiatric care is not as profitable as specialized spinal surgeries and hernia repairs.)
Almost every patient who comes in this way has a serious underlying condition—bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia—that even a couple of weeks surrounded by nurses, doctors, and social workers cannot fix. In the late eighties, following a legal challenge to Koch’s involuntary-hospitalization initiative, one judge described the city’s approach as “revolving door mental health—that is, forcibly institutionalize, forcibly medicate, stabilize, discharge back into the same environment, and then repeat the cycle.” Thirty-five years later, the vocabulary that’s used to describe the city’s mental-health-care system hasn’t changed. “It’s a revolving door,” a cop who was working an overtime shift on a subway platform in Clinton Hill told me. “We bring them in, and the hospital just discharges them!” She and her partner both had a few streaks of gray in their tidy black hair, and wore matching N.Y.P.D. beanies. The second cop sighed. “In and out,” she said. “I’m not sure anything we do is going to help if the hospitals keep letting them go.”
The hospitals keep letting them go because they often have to. Patients can always refuse treatment or ask to be released; compelling someone to stay requires a court order from a judge, and the legal standard is high. The hospital must prove that the patient poses an immediate threat to himself or to others, and that his judgment is so impaired by his illness that he doesn’t even understand that he needs help. A psychiatrist at a city-run hospital sketched out a hypothetical scenario: Two men with paranoid schizophrenia arrive in the back of an ambulance, escorted by police. Both are living at homeless shelters, and neither has eaten in about five days. A doctor asks each man, “Why are you starving yourself to death?” The first says, “The voice of God is commanding me to go on a hunger strike!” The second replies, “The food at the shelter is disgusting. I’ll eat when I have money to buy something good.” Both men have a serious mental illness, but only the first will be made to stay at the hospital against his will. The second can walk out the door.
On a recent Tuesday morning, I visited the second floor of a shabby building on Rockaway Avenue, in Brownsville. Social workers were sitting in blue office chairs, surrounded by large Rubbermaid containers filled with granola bars, body lotion, sweatpants, toilet paper, detergent, and chocolate-chip cookies. The group is one of thirty-one Intensive Mobile Treatment teams, which care for the city’s “frequent fliers” and “heavy hitters”—the four hundred or so men and women who are regularly and repeatedly admitted and discharged from city and state psychiatric units, or released from Rikers, where a fifth of incarcerated people have been diagnosed as having a severe mental illness. I.M.T. teams help people who have a history of chronic street homelessness and violent behavior; a psychiatric diagnosis is not on the list of admission criteria, but almost all I.M.T. clients have one.
Just after ten o’clock, someone turned down the volume on a TV in the office, and the team’s leader, Lauren Schultz-Kappes, who wore bluejeans, yellow Nikes, and a silver heart necklace, began the day by giving an update on their twenty-seven clients. Tony was living in a shelter and recently went to a dentist appointment. J. B. Fresh had been staying at a nursing home and didn’t like the food. Batsheva was transferred to a state-run hospital on Staten Island. Alex requested a Russian Orthodox Bible with large type and has become obsessed with juice. Markease was scheduled to receive his psychotropic medicine via intramuscular injection at a veterans’ hospital. Merisa had court that afternoon. “She didn’t seem to understand why it was wrong for her to pepper-spray the emergency room,” Schultz-Kappes explained. “And she said, ‘Why’s it such a big deal?’ So, we’ll see how court goes today.” The list went on: Fantasia was a little internally preoccupied again. Casper was still street homeless. Raymond was still missing. Rene was doing all right. Marwan was back at Bellevue. “He’s a weird mix of really lucid at times and then really not understandable,” one of the social workers said.
Schultz-Kappes added, “And he’s really loud.”
New York has funded an alphabet soup of outreach groups and teams—M.C.T., B.R.C., S.O.S., ACT, B-HEARD, C.U.C.S., A.O.T., FACT, I.M.T.—each of which is different in origin, scale, and scope. A person with a mental illness is more likely to be the victim of a crime than to commit one, but every so often the script gets flipped. It’s in those moments that local and state politicians feel compelled to talk about change. Assisted Outpatient Treatment was announced, in 1999, after a schizophrenic man, who had been in and out of psychiatric care and had stopped taking his medication, pushed a thirty-two-year-old woman named Kendra Webdale in front of an N train. Webdale died, and that year the state passed Kendra’s Law, which allowed a court to mandate outpatient treatment, including psychotropic medication. (Around three thousand patients are currently under such orders.) City Hall launched I.M.T. teams in 2016, after a person with a mental illness killed a thirty-six-year-old woman named Ana Charle, who ran a homeless shelter in the Bronx.
In 2022, there was another horrific crime, another person failed by the system. Martial Simon, whose medical records included dozens of psychiatric hospitalizations, indicating that he was a serious threat to himself and to others, walked up to a forty-year-old woman named Michelle Go one morning and pushed her onto the subway tracks, where she was run over and killed by a train. Before the incident, Simon had been in the emergency room at Queens Hospital Center. A psychiatrist who treated him at another hospital told me, “If someone had just read his chart, it would have flagged for them ‘Hey, this guy is the real deal.’ ” Instead, clinical staff decided that he was malingering, or faking his symptoms, and told him to leave.
The goal of most outreach teams is to get a patient from one point of care to the next—a complicated and difficult process. (A hundred thousand city residents with severe mental illness are not receiving any mental-health treatment.) Sometimes, when a person gets discharged from a hospital or released from Rikers, he’ll leave with a pill bottle filled with thirty days’ worth of Abilify, Ativan, or Haldol. Often, though, a person leaves with only a prescription, and it is not uncommon for it to be sent to a pharmacy that’s far away from where he wants to end up—to a Walgreens in the Bronx, for instance, even though he is staying in a homeless shelter downtown. Several people who have stayed in shelters told me that, if they don’t show up for a night to claim their bed, staffers throw away their medicine—along with everything else they own. (The city’s Department of Homeless Services told me that, when someone does not return, shelters store their belongings for at least seven days.)
The waiting list to be treated by an I.M.T. team can be at least six months—and sometimes much longer—but once someone has been assigned they are in really good hands. A social worker named Bridgette Callaghan, who oversees six I.M.T. teams, said, “For the people that are, like, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ I’m, like, ‘No problem, I will absolutely go do that. Can I grab you a cup of coffee first?’ And they’re, like, ‘Yes, you can. But then leave!’ That can be the first thing. And then, the next week, I’ll show up with the coffee that I know they’ll drink, and I’m, like, ‘Hey, it’s nice to see you again. Are you going to tell me to go fuck off again? Yes? All right, I’ll see you next week.’ ” It takes months to build trust.
“I get it, social workers have not been great,” Callaghan said. “And we’re just another one—until we’re not.” I.M.T. teams take their clients to Yankee Stadium for baseball games and buy them Chinese food for lunch. (Each client costs taxpayers around eight hundred and forty dollars a week; admission to a city-run psychiatric unit, or incarceration on Rikers, is at least ten times that.) Clinicians administer medicine via intramuscular injection anywhere and everywhere—a Burger King bathroom, a Penn Station turnstile, an abandoned building where a client is hiding out. One nurse taught clients self-defense in Prospect Park. Another offers cooking classes.
Later on the afternoon that I visited the Brownsville team, clients began to show up. Cindy, who wore maroon leggings, violet nail polish, pink lipstick, and an oversized ruby-red ring, told me that she lives in a homeless shelter and attends group-therapy sessions. She preferred to talk about her outfit, though. “I love the color red,” she said. A social worker handed her a cup of hot chocolate. Nearby, a man named Brandon spun around in Schultz-Kappes’s office chair. He was supposed to get an injection that morning, but the team’s nurse had COVID, so he was shouting instead. A man named Joseph said, “Can I get a laptop?” Joseph had arrived in a dirty gray Marmot puffer carrying a wad of crumpled documents, including his birth certificate. He told me that he had been sleeping in the stairwell of his cousin’s building. “I just stay outside and play on my phone. That’s how I get my Netflix,” he said. Joseph added that the city had recently transferred him to a new homeless shelter in Far Rockaway—“Far Rock? I’m not going! It says take three trains!”—and that the last shelter had thrown away all his personal effects. “I’m used to starting from scratch. I like it. Or—I don’t like it,” he said, pausing. “It’s only material stuff. Expensive stuff, but— Can I get detergent? Laundry detergent?”
A social worker handed Joseph a jug of Tide. He was headed to Coney Island for a thirty-day temporary-housing program, arranged by the team. The residence offered toiletry kits, pajamas, beach towels, and a space for yoga. There was a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, and a grill in the back yard. Joseph was a bit reluctant to go. “Do I gotta check in at ten o’clock?” he asked. Callaghan explained, “It’s not a hospital. You can come and go as you please. But there’s probably a curfew, and I know when you’re first moving in they’ll want to wash all your clothes, and you’ll probably have to take a shower.” Joseph gave a small nod. “I’ll give you a call when I get there,” he said.
In 1954, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication called Thorazine, which could be used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. For the first time, it was possible to provide meaningful care for the mentally ill on an outpatient basis. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, hundreds of thousands of patients across the country were released from derelict state-run asylums. (A key provision of the Medicare and Medicaid Act, passed in 1965, was that the federal government would no longer pay for care in that type of dedicated facility.) By one count, more than forty-seven thousand previously institutionalized patients moved to New York City. Some lived with families; others lived in single-room-occupancy hotels. When those closed down, in the late seventies and early eighties, people with mental illness started appearing in greater numbers on the city’s streets and subways. Most of the funding that had been promised by lawmakers for community-based outpatient care never arrived. The dream of deinstitutionalization collapsed. In 1985, the president of the American Psychiatric Association summed up the situation in an interview with a newspaper: “The chronic mentally ill patient has had his locus of living and care transferred from a single lousy institution to multiple wretched ones.”
Meanwhile, police and corrections officers became de-facto mental-health-care providers, one 911 call at a time. In 1999, the police responded to some sixty-four thousand calls about Emotionally Disturbed Persons, the official designation for people presenting symptoms of severe mental illness. (Mental-health advocates consider the label demeaning.) By 2022, the number of such calls had almost tripled; the city’s cops responded to nearly five hundred mental-health crises every day. The N.Y.P.D. is, in effect, the largest psychiatric-outreach team in America.
About a decade ago, under pressure from advocates, the Police Department began offering a four-day course, called Crisis Intervention Training, which taught officers to use “active listening” and “de-escalation strategies” when approaching people with mental illness. (An early version of C.I.T. was developed by an instructor who also taught the department’s hostage-negotiation course; he changed the background color of the slide deck.) Today, roughly forty per cent of N.Y.P.D. officers have received the training, during which improv actors pretend to have psychotic episodes in the department’s “scenario villages,” which include a bank vestibule, several apartments, and part of a subway car. But the city’s 911 system can’t specifically dispatch cops with that training to situations that would benefit from their expertise. (N.Y.P.D. officials recently told internal investigators that they are developing a “Next Generation 911” system, which may fix the problem; the last overhaul to the system, which was completed in 2004, cost more than two billion dollars.) Following Mayor Adams’s November press conference, the N.Y.P.D. started to require additional training on how to identify someone who is experiencing a mental-health crisis. Nine of ten patrol cops have completed it. The training, which happens during roll call, and includes an at-home video component, lasts for twenty-five minutes.
According to a Washington Post database, since 2015 about a fifth of people killed by police nationwide have been in the midst of a mental-health crisis. An investigation by The City, a nonprofit news outlet in New York, found that, during a recent three-year stretch, fourteen people in such a crisis were killed by the N.Y.P.D. In those cases, most of the officers on the scene had not received C.I.T.; in one instance, the cop who killed a mentally ill person was the only responding officer who had not received it. But even a well-trained police officer is not the best person to defuse a mental-health emergency. Six weeks ago, two officers shot a forty-two-year-old homeless man in the midst of a schizophrenic episode. One had received C.I.T.; both had completed the Mayor’s mandated mental-health training. The victim, Raul de la Cruz, was visiting his father’s apartment to take a shower. He and his father got into an argument. His father called 311 for help, and de la Cruz picked up a knife. The call lasted twenty-three minutes; the cops shot Raul twenty-eight seconds after arriving on the scene.
One night in late November, two police officers working a shift in the subway came across a sixty-four-year-old homeless woman in need of assistance. She had a history of hospitalization and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. They did not reach for handcuffs or call an ambulance. Instead, the cops escorted her to a nondescript office building in East Harlem. Around eleven o’clock, a receptionist buzzed them up to the second floor. A security guard searched the woman for weapons and needles, an intake nurse took her vitals, and a peer counsellor led her upstairs to a dormitory with three-inch mattresses, clean sheets, and a small dresser. The next morning, the woman met with a psychiatrist named Rob. “The cops were really nice,” she explained. “They said that I should be in a new place.”
The woman had landed at one of the city’s two Support and Connection Centers, formerly known as Diversion Centers, where people with mental illness and substance-use problems can stay for five or ten days—a sort of way station where they can avoid the hospital or the criminal-justice system, at least for a little while. (Drug use and mental illness often go hand in hand; Bridgette Callaghan, the I.M.T. social worker, told me, “Drugs are an unhealthy coping skill. But they are a coping skill. Everyone deserves some relief.”) The Support and Connection Center program, modelled on similar ones in San Antonio, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, is good but not especially large. Since it opened, three years ago, the facility has served eight hundred and fifty people—a fraction of a per cent of the city’s mental-health 911 calls during that period. “In five days, it can feel like we’re not able to do a lot for people,” Carli Wargo, who runs the center, told me. “What we can do is remind people that they’re deserving of compassion and dignity and safety. That’s something that the big system often forgets.” She added, “We’re not going to fix the system. It’s just not possible. But when I hear, ‘I felt safe there,’ and ‘I felt heard,’ those are the biggest compliments.” Guests can spend their time watching television or checking Facebook; they can also meet with clinicians and substance-use counsellors, apply for supportive housing, and attend various therapy sessions. Above some computers, someone had stuck a note, written in red marker:
Downstairs, the woman told the psychiatrist, Rob, that she became homeless two years ago after the friend she had been staying with died. She added that she experienced frequent panic attacks, difficulty sleeping, and schizophrenic delusions, and that she had been admitted to several inpatient psychiatric units. Her current psychotropic medicine, Risperdal, wasn’t working. She didn’t want anyone to take her vitals again. She wouldn’t eat any solid food. “I have trouble trusting people,” she said. A nurse brought her a nutritional shake, and the woman drank it. Then she said that she didn’t want to go back to a hospital or to a homeless shelter, and that she didn’t want to live in the subway anymore. “I need to go somewhere where people can help me out,” she said. One day in early December, she was admitted to an assisted-living facility; that night, she disappeared.
In February, a man who police say was experiencing a mental-health crisis, and who had stopped taking his medication, rammed a U-Haul truck into several pedestrians and a police officer in South Brooklyn. Eight people were injured, and one died. Two weeks later, Mayor Adams gave another speech about his plan for people living with severe mental illness. “This is the next phase,” he said, pledging that the city would expand a pilot program that dispatched medical professionals instead of police officers to respond to most mental-health 911 calls. (The program had been widely criticized; last year, the average response time was more than fifteen minutes, and medical personnel weren’t sent out during late-night hours.) The Mayor also announced seven million dollars in funding for mental-health clubhouses, where people with severe mental illness can meet with social workers and psychiatrists, and, what is perhaps more important, connect with one another—over a game of chess, an art project, a meal.
This winter, I visited some of the city’s mental-health clubhouses. One afternoon, at Fountain House, in Hell’s Kitchen, a man told me about the collapse of his business, in New Jersey, in 2014. “I had lost all my income, so I knew I was going to be homeless,” he said. He was dressed in Gore-Tex boots, a red scarf, and a tight-fitting leather jacket. “My first option, at that time, was to commit suicide.” We sat in a small room, and light streamed through a large window. Upstairs, social workers and counsellors discussed supportive-housing and Medicaid applications. Downstairs, a woman with three large tote bags handed out peppermint candies and pastel-colored lapel pins. “You can take up to twenty,” she said. “Praise God!” On the second floor, the man with Gore-Tex boots spoke slowly and plainly. “I wanted to jump under a train,” he said. “I didn’t have the courage.”
He went on, “Why would you want to expose yourself to the things that could happen through homelessness? Homelessness isn’t just the condition of being without a home. It’s the ultimate brutality. The fact that I’m here now, and all that’s behind me, it wasn’t given.” He had spent three weeks in a homeless shelter, and a few years in rehab programs meant for alcoholics, and a few more at some halfway houses in Far Rockaway. “If the guy who owned the place didn’t like the look of you, he’d come and give you a black garbage bag and say, ‘Get the fuck out.’ In that setting, there isn’t any of this ‘tenants’ law,’ or any of that crap. When I was first there, the road was unpaved. Just gravel. And every time it rained the water would build up about this high”—he used his hands to show me what a lot of water looked like—“and you were forced to walk through the water, and then you’d have to go through the whole day with wet feet.”
In 2017, he arrived at Fountain House, which helped get him a part-time job and connected him with supportive housing—his first apartment in four years. “For about six months, I didn’t trust it,” he said. “I bought a blow-up mattress and just slept on that and waited for them to come and kick me out. Slowly, it dawned on me that they weren’t going to. And a certain amount of growth happened from there. The growth comes from security.” It was quiet for a moment. “I’ve had just over five years of good stability,” he said. “I haven’t had any major incidents or anything for five years. The only thing is that about a week ago at my job I did have an incident with someone.”
He wouldn’t elaborate. Recently, when I tried to get back in touch with him, Nancy Young, who is a program director at Fountain House, told me that he didn’t want to speak with me again. “He’s had other incidents in the past,” she said. “Sometimes he reaches out to me and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he self-corrects. Every single person here has a story like that. This is a place that helps people pick themselves up.” Our conversation turned to Jordan Neely’s death. “It’s an us-and-them mentality,” she said. “We don’t feel connected to people with mental illness at all. We feel scared of them. It’s easy for people to fall from a healthy place, and yet we blame them for not knowing how to make it in this world. It’s scary when we see someone who reminds us that it could happen to any of us.” She paused. “I wish we had found Jordan Neely. I wish we knew him. It could have been very different.”
In and out. Around and around. One institution to the next: 7-Eleven, Kirby Forensic, Atlantic Armory, Manhattan Psychiatric, Maimonides, Lincoln, Kings County, Bellevue. Tonight, there are more than seventy thousand people without beds of their own sleeping in homeless shelters and temporary-housing programs and other places, too. Some shelters have kitchens that serve freshly stewed chicken thighs and homemade strawberry pie; others serve chicken that is undercooked and mealy apples for dessert. Many shelter beds are seven inches off the ground and bolted to the floor. For the mentally ill, there are forty-nine hundred beds in mental-health shelters, but more than forty-nine hundred people want to sleep in them. And so tonight mentally ill men and women are sleeping in large intake shelters, on the street, in the trains. Tomorrow, they will wake up and go about their day.
Patrol cops will help them, and harass them, and call ambulances, which will pick them up and take them to the hospital, often but not always against their will. Some will stay there for a long time. Others will leave after lunch. The most fortunate among them will meet with their I.M.T. or ACT or A.O.T. teams—nurses, behavioral specialists, social workers turned friends. They will also go to the deli for breakfast, to the train station, to their jobs, to the grocery store. They’ll sit down and rest for a while, in a plastic chair at the library, or on a park bench, under a favorite sycamore tree.
Recently, at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, in Brooklyn, I watched as a woman walked slowly toward the painted yellow line at the edge of the platform. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the woman was dressed in a long gray parka with the hood pulled up. She was wearing reflective bicycling gloves and dirty suède boots; her hands were moving in wobbly circles above her head, almost as if she were dancing. She looked and looked into the tunnel; usually, people don’t stand so close to the tracks for so long. As the train screeched into the station, the woman sprinted toward the yellow line. The train thundered past; she stopped. Then the doors opened, and strangers poured onto the platform. The woman boarded the crowded train. Inside, several people made idle chitchat. A few others looked down at their phones. ♦
