Gothamist – By Caroline Lewis | Mar 24, 2025
City Council members pressed health officials Monday on the long wait times New Yorkers with serious mental illnesses face when trying to enroll with teams that connect them with treatment and housing.
“These are extremely important programs and we are looking to expand them,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn.
There are currently 672 people waiting to be added to the caseload of one of the city’s Intensive Mobile Treatment teams, Dr. H. Jean Wright II, executive deputy commissioner of the city health department’s Division of Mental Hygiene, said at Monday’s City Council hearing on the health budget.
These teams are designed to provide mental health and substance use treatment to people with transient living situations who routinely interact with the mental health and criminal justice systems and have recently shown signs of unsafe behavior, among other criteria.
Similar Assertive Community Treatment teams have a 682-person wait list, Wright said.
These and other similar teams are operated by nonprofits but receive city funding, and the city health department serves as a single point of access to take referrals for the teams from clinicians, family members, homeless service providers and other sources, officials said.
Wright was unable to say how long people typically have to wait to enroll in one of these teams after they’re referred for care, but he did say that some of the people on the wait lists are already enrolled in teams and waiting to be transferred to ones closer to where they reside.
He also noted that people receive care coordination from the city while they’re waiting to enroll in outreach teams, and are not precluded from getting connected to other services while they wait.
Dr. Michelle Morse, the acting city health commissioner, emphasized at the hearing that many people are already benefiting from these programs. The city currently funds 38 Intensive Mobile Treatment teams with an annual budget of $42 million, and they served more than 1,000 people in fiscal year 2024, she said.
The City Council has yet to release its official response to the mayor’s preliminary budget, which will include detailed funding proposals. The Vera Institute of Justice, which seeks to reduce incarceration, has called for the city to increase the budget for Intensive Mobile Treatment teams in the upcoming fiscal year by about 50%.
But increased city funding has already allowed Intensive Mobile Treatment teams to expand in recent years. And in an audit released last year, City Comptroller Brad Lander said the city health department should improve oversight and reporting on outcomes to prove they’re worth the investment.
Some are looking at alternative ways to reduce the waitlists. The nonprofit Institute for Community Living has used private funding to pilot a step-down program that seeks to help people move off of Intensive Mobile Treatment and Assertive Community Treatment teams to less intensive services when they’re ready. Speaker Adrienne Adams said in her State of the City report that the city should also invest in this model.
As City Council members call for an expansion of these and other community-based mental health programs, they are also calling out Mayor Eric Adams for focusing too heavily on involuntary hospitalization as the answer to the city’s mental health problems.
In a new policy brief released Monday, council members said the Adams administration has yet to provide sufficient data to show that existing efforts to take people to the hospital against their will for psychiatric evaluation are having positive outcomes.
“Those who are part of this analysis, they need to move out of the sterilized environment of the City Council Chamber, and they need to go and do what we do, go on the subway system, look at the population in need,” Mayor Adams said at a press conference Monday, when asked about the City Council brief. “We’re going to respond to that need.”
In 2022, Adams issued new protocols to police and clinicians, expanding the criteria for when someone should be involuntarily transported to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He said that should happen when someone shows signs of a mental illness and also appears unable to meet their own basic needs — not just when a person poses a danger to themselves or others.
Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul are pushing to get that standard codified in state law.
