Mental Healthcare

Mental health is health. But in New York, too many are still forced to navigate a system built around scarcity, crisis, and profit instead of prevention and intervention.

When people cannot access care, they end up cycling between the emergency room, the shelter system, the street, and jail. This cycle often retraumatizes individuals already living with trauma, and less effective for everyone involved. We need community based care and more respite centers with shorter waiting times.

Universal Healthcare Must include Mental Health
Universal healthcare must include access to mental healthcare, addiction recovery treatment, and harm reduction services to ensure that people can get the quality care they need before reaching a point of crisis. No one should have to wait until they are in the emergency room, on the street, or in handcuffs to access treatment.

Pass Daniel's Law and Integrate a Peer Led Crisis Response
Mental health crises require a mental health response. We need to invest in a peer-led crisis response, as well as expanding access to community-based treatment and prevention services.

Build a Full Continuum of Care
New York needs more than emergency rooms and short-term crisis beds. We need supportive housing, stabilization beds, outpatient treatment, peer support, and long-term community care that helps people to recover long-term. That is how we break the revolving door between the streets, shelters, hospitals, and incarceration.

Expand the Mental Health Workforce
We cannot fix a broken system without the people to staff it. I support better pay, faster hiring, and stronger workforce pipelines to recruit and retain social workers, counselors, psychiatrists, peer specialists, and other mental health professionals. Our care system should not be held together by burnout and understaffing.