New York
Will New York Force More Mentally Ill People Into Treatment?
It is a nightmare that plays out on the streets and subways every few months: A homeless person with a history of mental illness or violence falls through the cracks or wanders away from the system intended to help him, surfaces in a psychotic rage and attacks a random New Yorker.
Though they make up a tiny fraction of crimes, the unpredictable attacks feed perceptions that the city is unsafe and stir demands for action. Politicians send police officers and National Guard members into the subways and pour money into outreach efforts and housing.
And as long-running arguments persist over how to balance public safety and the civil rights of mentally ill people, another outburst inevitably happens.
The debate resurfaced last month when Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a package of laws to make it easier to take people in psychiatric crisis to a hospital involuntarily, easier to hold them there and harder for hospitals to push them back to the street before they fully stabilize.
But Ms. Hochul’s efforts, unveiled in her latest executive budget, face an uphill battle in the Legislature and opposition from progressives and civil liberties groups.
“Critics will say this criminalizes poverty or homelessness,” Ms. Hochul said last month. “I say that is flat-out wrong.”
She added, “This is about having the humanity and the compassion to help people incapable of helping themselves, fellow human beings who are suffering from mental illness that is literally putting their lives and the lives of others in danger.”
In proposing the changes — most of them longstanding requests from Mayor Eric Adams — Ms. Hochul joined a long line of leaders who have struggled to help people in psychosis on the streets and subways.
But even if all her changes were enacted, some supporters question how much impact they would have.
“We have to deal with the mental health crisis,” Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said last month. “But this is another one where I always say to you: The hell is in the details.”
Ms. Hochul’s proposals include these changes to the state’s Mental Hygiene Law:
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Clarifying the threshold: Allow authorities to take someone involuntarily to a hospital for evaluation when mental illness leaves them so incapable of providing for “essential needs” like shelter, food or clothing that it causes a substantial risk of physical harm. Current law is less specific, though it allows involuntary transport to a hospital when someone’s conduct endangers themselves or others.
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Holistic decision-making: Require hospitals to consider psychiatric patients’ whole history, rather than just how they are behaving in the moment, when deciding whether to admit them against their will and whether to discharge them.
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Hospital admissions: At hospitals, give psychiatric nurse practitioners the power to admit patients involuntarily if a physician concurs. This would address a shortage of psychiatrists, though it only applies to 60-day admissions, which are longer than most.
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Mandated outpatient treatment: Make it easier to renew expired “Kendra’s Law” court orders, which require some psychiatric patients to get outpatient treatment after they have been discharged, including taking medication. Often, after an order expires, the person stops taking medication and their mental health declines.
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Improved coordination: Require hospitals to consult and coordinate with a psychiatric patient’s care providers in the community when the person is admitted or discharged, to keep track of patients after they leave the hospital.
The legislators running the committees with oversight of these issues have expressed deep skepticism about Ms. Hochul’s proposals. They have questioned the need for the changes and said they would force homeless people off the streets without giving them enough services. And they worry that not enough is being invested in street-level mental health workers.
State Senator Samra Brouk, chairwoman of the Mental Health Committee, acknowledged that the state’s “current crisis response is inadequate, and individuals suffering on the streets need our help.” But she asserted that expanding involuntary commitment “is not the compassionate way to get people the help they need.”
She vowed to oppose efforts that “coerce individuals into treatment or detention.”
Ms. Brouk’s Assembly counterpart, Jo Anne Simon, said politics and perceived dangers on the subway were driving the debate, not what was best for vulnerable people living with mental illness.
“My concern is we are not really addressing the problem, and we are potentially being asked to do something that I see as likely to exacerbate the problem,” she said.
But a psychiatrist at a nonprofit that provides social services and housing to people with serious mental illness in New York City said Ms. Hochul’s proposal could make a difference on the street.
The psychiatrist, Ellen Tabor, associate chief medical officer at the Institute for Community Living, said that if the “essential needs” standard for taking someone involuntarily to a hospital was widely used, a lot more people would get needed psychiatric help.
“To have the police pick you up and take you against your will, that’s terrifying, I get that,” she said. “But too often they don’t, and there’s a dangerous situation.”
Democrats control both legislative chambers and will haggle with Ms. Hochul about her proposals in negotiations over the entire budget.
Earlier this month, a coalition of 39 social service, housing advocacy and civil rights organizations sent a letter to Mr. Heastie and State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader, asking them to reject Ms. Hochul’s proposals and instead “invest in solutions that work, including housing, services and care.”
Since taking office, Ms. Hochul has poured about $1 billion into building out the state’s mental health system, including funding for new housing units designed for people with mental illness. This year’s proposals are smaller but do include some money for more mental health outreach teams and beds in inpatient facilities.
Beth Haroules, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which signed the letter, said law enforcement and government should focus more on using the laws already on the books to reach people who cannot help themselves.
The language about who would qualify for involuntary transport to a hospital for assessment is too broad, she said, adding that Ms. Hochul’s measures would infringe on homeless people’s rights and leave them at the mercy of law enforcement officers who are not properly trained.
“It is that loss of liberty as a result of mistaken assessment by a law enforcement officer who is not clinically trained to make the determinations,” she said, “which deprives a person of liberty.”
Last year, people were involuntarily taken to hospitals for psychiatric evaluation at least 800 times from the transit system and at least 700 times from other public spaces, according to the mayor’s office, which only just started tracking the holds.
Ms. Hochul’s proposals do not include all the changes Mr. Adams has pushed for. One left on the cutting-room floor would require hospitals to seek Kendra’s Law orders for all psychiatric patients who meet the standard for them.
Brian Stettin, Mr. Adams’s senior adviser for severe mental illness, applauded Ms. Hochul’s advocacy and committed to working with her and state lawmakers.
“We are pleased that Governor Hochul is supporting measures to help people reclaim their lives, even when they cannot recognize their own need for assistance,” he said in a statement.
Most of the governor’s proposals already exist in the form of agency regulations, guidance or court rulings, but some experts said that the police, hospitals and clinicians would be more likely to follow them if they were enshrined in law.
Ann Marie T. Sullivan, commissioner of the State Office of Mental Health, said that the proposals would affect a “very small select group of individuals” and that after years of shortages of psychiatric hospital beds in the city, there were now enough beds to accommodate them.
She said the measures would “help individuals who make these difficult but important decisions know better how to make those decisions.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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