Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2022.When Mayor Eric Adams announced a new policy directing police and EMTs to forcibly send more people to the hospital for psychiatric evaluations, he called it a “moral mandate.” For Ibrahim Ayu, the directive sounded more like a mandate to traumatize New Yorkers like him, who are struggling to get by while coping with mental illness.
Ibrahim Ayu, who said he's been forcibly hospitalized twice this year, feared Mayor Eric Adams' mental health initiative will result in abuse of people with mental illness.Ayu, 41, has been hospitalized against his will twice this year. After receiving news of two back-to-back deaths in his family, Ayu rushed to get psychiatric help from Kings County Hospital, where he says an altercation with police landed him in the psychiatric ward involuntarily for one week.
The mayor’s announcement was triggering for Kam Brock, a musician from Long Island, who cried when she heard the news. She said she feared the directive could result in more people like her being medicated without consent. “A doctor came up behind me,” she remembered. “I saw a needle about to go into my arm, then I screamed at the top of my lungs, then I was unconscious.”Kam Brock, a musician who sued and lost at trial over her forced hospitalization at Harlem Hospital, worried about the consequences of Mayor Eric Adams' mental health initiative.
“Adverse experiences with the police feature very prominently in the delusional thought systems and real-life experience of many people with serious mental illness who are homeless,” she said. “This [policy] will just make that worse.” The experience made Kadosh think the officer had received training on how to deal with someone in a mental health crisis. But even Kadosh fears the mayor’s directive could be “applied unevenly” to their non-white friends.
VOCALNewYork You just can’t force someone with mental health problems to do something or go somewhere that triggers more mental health issues and anxiety it’s very traumatic. Police an officials are not trained to work& or know how deescalate people when having a meltdown
They need to move to a less crowded state like Florida or Texas.
If true, this is worth fixing, but either way we should not leave people on the street unless we want to turn into a shithole like San Francisco.