Is New York City investing enough in mental health treatment?

New York City Council Member Linda Lee, a trained social worker who previously led the nonprofit Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York, has seen firsthand the challenges of providing mental health counseling. The Queens legislator says her work today as chair of the Council’s mental health committee is informed by the frustrations she had in her past nonprofit work. 

City & State spoke with Lee about the City Council’s mental health priorities and where they do – or don’t – align with the Adams administration’s mental health policies. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

What have been your priorities on the Mental Health Committee and are there any notable bills signed into law or priorities coming up? 

I don't know how much you've looked into the (council’s mental health) road map, but that was really where the initial four pillars of the road map came from, was just trying to focus on buckets of major things that we saw as an issue in the community. Looking at the four pillars: the buckets of workforce, the criminal justice system and how that interacts with mental health, as well as preventative services, and how there's been such a lack of focus on that. It has to be a multipronged approach. And the last pillar was just dealing with trying to break down the silos in government, because so much of the mental health regulations and compliance lies at the state level, and on the city side, we do have access to funding, but have to work hand-in-hand.

What are the laws that passed in the first phase of the road map, and what impact do you hope they'll have?

One of the things that we did was expand the crisis respite centers. Because I don't think most people realize this, but we only have 15 beds in all of New York City, which is not a lot. These crisis respite centers are supposed to be for someone who's having an episode, let's say, of severe mental illness. Maybe (an) inpatient unit is not necessarily the best place, so where are these other places that people can go to get services in a very short-term, immediate setting? Another example is reporting bills. How do we keep track of, for example, the opioid settlement funding that was given to us through the lawsuit with the (state attorney general’s) office? 

Another example that we started off at the council side is we wanted to do a new initiative to look at the workforce. On the front end, we said how do we work with CUNY, perhaps, and some other academic institutions to give stipends to students going into mental health and then, on the back end, for those that have already graduated with their degrees, how do we do some small loan forgiveness stipend amount? We're trying to see what we can do to encourage folks to go into the mental health sector.

You and other New York City Council members have been trying to find additional funds to help some mental health clubhouses currently at risk of shutting down. Are there any updates to this work to support those clubhouses?

Sadly, I thought that the mayor’s office would pick up this money, because it's really such a drop in the bucket. We were only asking for $2 or $3 million just to keep these clubhouses whole for this following year. Technically, the contract ends in October, but that's just not enough time for them to figure out where to place people, how to transition out. A lot of them want to continue services, because it's so essential and important. When you're talking about clubhouses, it's not one size fits all.  A lot of (people) actually prefer to go to smaller clubhouses where they feel seen, where they're not experiencing anxiety, and some of these folks have been going there for 5, 10, 15 years.

We put $2 million into the budget to actually keep the clubhouses that did not get the RFP whole through fiscal year 2025. There were about nine clubhouses that did not get the new contract. And of those nine clubhouses, five of them decided to continue on, and four others actually did not, because I think that they felt it would be too hard to sustain the program. Obviously, we're working already now to see what we can do to help them beyond FY 25.

How well has the Adams administration been doing on mental health-related issues and has there been alignment between the City Council and administration?

In the beginning, I personally was very hopeful, because the mayor's office did say that mental health was a huge priority for their administration and for their office. I'll just give this as an example. Right in May, the final executive budget came out. I was disappointed because in his Fiscal Year 2025 executive budget, in terms of what we wanted to see funded and restored, there was about a little over $43 million that was still missing that we needed to make up. Some of those things we got, some we didn't. It's unfortunate. 

This is just my personal opinion as someone who's worked in health care for a while. When you keep people healthy and out of the emergency rooms and out of inpatient, it saves the city and state money, right? I just feel like it's not only the right thing to do, but economically it makes a lot of sense as well.