7 On Your Side Investigates finds more people in mental crisis; patient beds decreasing
March 12, 2025
ABC7 News
Dan Krauth
NEW YORK (WABC) — It has been three years since Michelle Go was shoved onto the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train in Times Square, killing her.
The man who’s accused of shoving her has a history of mental illness and hasn’t been prosecuted in court yet because he has been found unfit to stand trial.
“I asked myself the same thing I’m sure your viewers asked, which is why was this person not in treatment?” said Manhattan Borough President and former Health Committee Chair Mark Levine.
“The whole system is underfunded, there’s a shortage everywhere that lets people fall into the cracks,” said Levine.
Ever since the pandemic, the issue of mental illness has become front and center on the streets and in the subway of New York City.
One in five New Yorkers experience mental illness in a given year and hundreds of thousands of them are not getting the care they need, according to the NYC Health Department.
Eyewitness news has gone along with the mayor’s outreach teams to walk the streets and subways as city officials try to get people help. A lot of that help involves quick stays in local emergency rooms.
According to Levine, about 1,000 people are on the waitlist for long term community-based treatment.
Meanwhile, the number of inpatient psychiatric beds statewide dropped by 12% over close to a 20-year time period. New York City alone lost more than 450 beds.
The problem became worse during the pandemic when many of the psych beds were converted to COVID beds.
“We’ve recovered none of those beds, as far as I can tell, with a few only a few exceptions,” said Levine.
He believes there’s a solution hiding in plain sight – the state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island. Two of the three buildings on campus are sitting empty.
“It’s this huge complex that at one point had 4,000 patients,” said Levine. “At this point, it has 400.”
It would take the city and state spending hundreds of millions of dollars to renovate the facility and hire staff to make it happen.
“That would be good for some part of the population but not the entire population,” said Perry Perlmutter with Services for the UnderServed.
Perlmutter said the industry is moving toward long-term community-based care that involves transitional housing.
“They’ll learn how to deal with their finances, they’ll learn about food, they’re learn how to deal with their mental illness or substance use problems,” said Perlmutter.
The state told us the governor is working to do both.
In a statement, the New York state Department of Health said:
“Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration has dramatically increased inpatient bed capacity across New York State, including at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island. While increasing bed capacity is a central component of her signature $1 billion plan to strengthen mental health services statewide, we are also dramatically expanding community-based mental health services for New Yorkers living with mental illness and building a much stronger system to ensure they can get the help they need whenever it is needed.”
Some say the issue isn’t just where people get help but getting them medical treatment in the first place. Governor Hochul proposed a package of laws this year to try and make it easier to admit someone involuntarily to a hospital who is experiencing a psychiatric crisis. It’s something she has tried to do in previous years but hasn’t been successful.