New York City mayoral candidates speak at Mental Health Town Hall
New York, NY – On Thursday, May 1, the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month, over 200 New Yorkers gathered to hear the city’s mayoral candidates speak on the topic of mental health at a town hall event. The event was organized by the New York City Mental Health Collective, a coalition of over 30 local community organizations working to improve mental health care in the city.
Taking place at the First Baptist Church in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, this town hall represented an important moment for the primarily Black and brown attendees to hear the various mayoral candidates’ opinions on how to deal with mental health, which has become an increasingly dire issue in New York. Over the last ten years, 911 calls for mental health emergencies have increased by an alarming 37%, proving that our current system is not adequately serving the people.
A total of seven mayoral candidates were present for the event: Selma Bartholomew, Michael Blake, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Scott Stringer, Whitney Tilson, and Jim Walden. Notably absent were two notorious figures in the city’s political landscape: the Democrat frontrunner and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the recently-turned-independent incumbent mayor, Eric Adams.
While all the candidates present agreed that mental health is an important issue that must be addressed citywide, they presented different approaches, some much more popular with the crowd than others. For example, Blake won the crowd over with calls to redirect funding away from the NYPD and towards non-police interventions for mental health crises. Meanwhile, Tilson bizarrely advocated for more involuntary hospitalization of mentally ill people, as well as “quality of life” policing that would make it illegal to sleep outdoors, which was not received well by the attendees.
The discussion also focused on the ways that mental health intersects with other issues affecting our city, including immigration, financial stability, childcare and education, and the justice system. Blake blasted Mayor Adams and his administration for directly worsening the mental health of immigrants by sucking up to the Trump administration and collaborating with ICE. Mamdani repeatedly called out Rikers Island, pointing out how our current system criminalizes the mentally ill, as well as worsening the mental health of all incarcerated people through inhumane processes like solitary confinement.
The attendees were clear on the positions they supported: applause rang out for non-punitive interventions aimed at harm reduction and community support, rather than branding people as criminals just for being poor, mentally ill, or homeless. “The NYPD has absolutely no place in mental health response,” Walden said, one of his most applauded lines of the evening.
The NYPD represents one of the biggest threats to mentally ill people in the city, as police are frequently called to respond to mental health crises, and their improper training often leads to serious harm or death of the person in crisis. One prominent example is the case of Eudes Pierre, a young Black man who was killed by the NYPD in December of 2021. Like many others, he called 911 in crisis, and, instead of deescalating the situation and getting him the care he needed, the police officers who responded to his call shot and killed him.
The family of Eudes Pierre now works with the New York Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an anti-police violence community organization, to demand Justice for Eudes Pierre. They also work with Correct Crisis Intervention Today, another local organization, to remove police from mental health crisis response.
Eudes Pierre’s case is just one of many examples of how the current system is failing people with mental illnesses in New York City. It’s clear that this is an important issue for the people of New York, and they know how it must be addressed on a citywide level. People need support, resources, and destigmatization, and they showed their approval for the mayoral candidates who promised to deliver those results.