People with severe mental illness need care and compassion

Jordan Neely’s heartbreaking, haunting, and cruel killing on the subway was a direct result of our city and state’s systemic failures to provide a comprehensive continuum of services and support with appropriate follow up and accountability — a view widely shared by leaders of 45 mental health advocacy agencies in a recent statement.

There is ample evidence that Neely had contact with a broad array of shelters, clinics, hospitals, street outreach teams, case management programs, and criminal justice and social service organizations. Our systems had more than a decade to meaningfully engage Neely and to provide him with sustained follow-up services and supports. Yet, at the time of his death, he had been identified by the city as one of the “top 50″ homeless individuals most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.

We often speak of our goal to provide a “no wrong door” system of mental health access. Neely, in fact, entered our system through several doors, but we failed him each time. We are too quick to label people as “hard to serve” and “non-compliant,” rather than acknowledge our system’s inability to effectively engage and support people in need with effective and voluntary measures.

On May 1, Neely was riding the subway, complaining of hunger and thirst, saying that he was tired, yelling that he didn’t care if he went to prison and that “it doesn’t even matter if I die.”

Neely’s desperate sense of despair may have been disturbing or even frightening to some, but it cannot be used to justify being choked to death on the floor of a subway car. Tragically, he met all four of the qualifications to be routinely and unjustifiably considered dangerous: he was a Black, male, homeless individual living with major mental health challenges.

We have to answer the question posed on social media — does anyone think there is a Black man in this country who could walk up to a white person in public, choke him to death in full view of other passengers and have it captured on video, and then just walk away after a brief chat with the police (albeit later to be indicted for manslaughter)?

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We must take action to respond to mental health crises with a public health rather than a criminalizing response that only drives people away and that fails to recognize that people with major mental health and trauma-related challenges are typically 11 times more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of violence, and no more likely to be violent than those who do not have such challenges.

We must not tolerate policies such as those recently introduced by Mayor Adams that promote detention by police of individuals who are merely perceived to have a mental health diagnosis, even when they do not present a danger to themselves or others. Such policies instill fear of those who look and act differently, and embolden vigilantes like the killer of Neely to act in depraved and unconscionable ways.

And we cannot understate how 13 years of broken state promises to fund cost of living increases have left us wholly unable to attract or retain enough mental health workers to support individuals like Jordan Neely and others who so desperately need our help. While historic in size and scope, the vast majority of the governor’s $1 billion commitment goes to new programs, rather than to providing adequate investments in our overwhelmed community system. Recovery and rights advocates are bitterly disappointed with the wholly inadequate 4% COLA that community agencies received in the governor’s and Legislature’s final FY’24 budget.

What we need is a system that succeeds in engaging people like Jordan Neely, that remains involved throughout the frequent challenges and crises that they may encounter, and that identifies one agency to take on the primary role of coordinating each individual’s services and resources to promote their safety and recovery.

To paraphrase Matt Kudish, executive director of NAMI-NYC, the Jordan Neelys of our world need one mental health care worker — rather than a series of different workers — to stay involved at every point, whether it is in the hospital, jail, mobile crisis treatment, on the street, or in the shelter. It’s not that the people who work in these different, siloed systems don’t care about the people they serve, but at some point, their role ends.

We owe it to the memory of Jordan Neely to do all we possibly can to support people in similar circumstances, to show that it indeed matters if they live or die.

Rosenthal is CEO of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services. Lowenkron is the disability justice director at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.