Agreed. I worked with a private charity in NYC that dealt with many mentally ill persons at that time. The Upstate mental hospitals were not only improving but some of them had excellent programs.
Then came the weird budget cuts, where they dumped care for the genuinely helpless and gave it to the genuinely lazy, including civil servants.
Our people went from decent treatment on beautiful campuses to unheated garages run by unscrupulous old ladies as “half way houses” to full blown “community mental health care” - meaning living in a doorway or on a subway platform.
Giuliani got a lot of these people out of the subways and public spaces simply by making it unpleasant to live there and forcing them further away, but to this day nobody has dealt with the mental health issues.
“Giuliani got a lot of these people out of the subways and public spaces simply by making it unpleasant to live there and forcing them further away, but to this day nobody has dealt with the mental health issues.”
Do you remember when Ed Koch tried to round up all the mentally ill homeless street wanderers and put them at Bellvue? It was a good idea, but the ACLU got involved and created trouble. They took this black woman, Billie Boggs,(real name Joyce Brown)who lived on top of a subway vent and defecated on the street, cleaned her up, dressed her up and had her recite prewritten speeches about how the city could not force her to go to hospital. It was against her “civil rights.” It was enough to squash the whole program. I read online that she returned to the streets at one point, living over the same subway vent as before, but now resides in a homeless shelter for women that the ACLU found for her. She is sometimes seen on the streets making obscene gestures at passersby. What the ACLU insisted upon was the kind of extreme civil liberties that are absurdities. Not made to take medications and allowed to traipse about without restraint, the mentally ill are among us as witnessed in the incident at Dave and Buster’s.