B-Roll, Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Updates New Yorkers on State Efforts to Address Serious Mental Illness and Street Homelessness

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul updated New Yorkers on the latest State efforts to provide treatment and support for individuals with serious mental illness, part of efforts funded by her $1 billion investment in mental health care in FY 2024 State Budget. The Governor announced that Safe Options Support teams have helped nearly 200 formerly homeless individuals find permanent housing. She also highlighted 99 new state-operated inpatient psychiatric beds are now available for use – more than halfway to the goal set in her budget proposal – and that approximately 500 inpatient psychiatric beds at community hospitals will be restored by January 2024.

B-ROLL of Governor Hochul meeting with a Safe Options Support Team is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

For far too long, society has literally ignored the crisis of mental health. But under my administration, we said no longer. And this morning I had the privilege of joining people who are literally on the front lines of solving the mental health crisis. I took the 6 train down, got out of Grand Central, had some nice conversations with New Yorkers, always so friendly when they look up from their cell phones eventually.

But I've had a chance to get off the train and meet the angels who are doing God's work here on Earth. These are members of our Homeless Outreach Units. We call them Safe Options Support, or SOS teams. And some of them are here today. I was so impressed. I could see the love in their eyes, knowing that what they're doing is so critically important.

I want to thank Dr. Ann Marie Sullivan, our Commissioner of the Office of Mental Health, for helping us chart a path forward where no man or woman has gone before, and leaning hard into solving what has been perceived as an intractable crisis for so long that he would have totally said we can't do it and moved on.

Jody Rudin, the President and CEO of the Institute for Community Living. You'll be hearing from Jody in a couple of minutes about the great work they're doing. And TJ Curtis, the Coordinator for Families on the Move of NYC. I like that, Families on the Move. And many of the community-based organizations who are here today. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We have Services for the Underserved, Federation of Organizations, Association for Care Management. Also, the many elected officials who've been acknowledged here today. And we talked about these SOS teams. I launched them in April of 2022, right? So, it's a new day. We wanted a different approach, to shake things up a little bit, you know, because the old way just wasn't working, right? We needed to get people that the homeless could trust, someone who understands them, who makes an effort to see them as human beings, give them respect and in so earning their trust, help them transition to a safer home.

And this will help them turn their lives around. I told them, “You are doing God's work here on earth.” And I said, when they find people in the throes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and so many other challenges, and we often see these people on the streets and in our parks and the subways, but these people are, I don't think they're trained to do this. I think it's innate. They treat them with compassion. They listen, they build that trust. And over the last year since we launched this, they've had over 2,000 contacts, 2,000. And they've guided, and this is the news flash, over 200 individuals who are chronically homeless, people suffering from severe mental illness, are now moved into permanent housing with wraparound services because of your work.

These were the ones that no one could move on before. And many of them in the throes of severe mental illness. Their stories are remarkable. Our team in Brooklyn found a man who'd been homeless for seven years, fifty-three years old, battling chronic addiction. In less than three months, they got him off the streets, into counseling, into supportive housing and my friends, he is thriving.

Now these individuals won't reach out to us. They're not going to say, “Oh, person wearing a purple t shirt that says SOS, I think I'd like to, after seven years of living here, maybe follow you to another place.” No, the work has to come from us. And we have to put the money and support behind this, an intentional effort. And my $1 billion historic investment in mental health, I proposed it, but I thank the legislature for supporting this as well. Our members of the Assembly and the Senate and our leadership. I said, “We can start with eight homeless—new homeless outreach teams. We can expand the vital work that was already going on five in New York City and others across Upstate.”

And I said, “Let's not waste a single minute in getting that billion dollars out the door.” It's not doing me any good sitting in a bank in Albany, right? We need that on the streets. So, six months after the Budget passed, and those paying attention to government know this is a historic timetable, nearly half of the RFPs that are for funding are already available, and the money is going out the door now. And that is critical. That is what urgency is all about. That'll help inpatient, outpatient, school-based mental health, housing, transitional beds, and workforce development. That's what we call a continuum of care. That's what it looks like. That is the way you solve the mental health crisis. And this system, as we know, has failed New Yorkers for so long.

This system turned them away. And I said, “Enough is enough. It's a new day.” And our new reimagining of mental health altogether, first of all, removing the stigma. Removing the stigma. I get reports almost every week from my mental health team on their progress. And I know we've identified probably 4,500 chronically homeless on our streets, unsheltered. And over half of them do have mental health challenges. So, let's take that population. And that's the population we've already been targeting. And there's so many ways to deal with this. But I want you to know we're proud of that success. I want to lift up the people who are implementing something we can talk about and propose in Albany. But I need the foot soldiers. And those are the people I'm here today to applaud and thank them in person, on the streets, and in our subways.

You know, there's other aspects of mental health, some that we would not have foreseen not that many years ago. Yesterday, as we spoke about mental health. We're talking about children. Children who are sitting there, prey to these algorithms designed by very sophisticated companies that keep bombarding them with messages. And they're not showing pictures of puppies and lollipops. This is not positive, and that's actually quite sad when you think about it. This had the potential to give uplifting images to young people, especially girls, about body image and how insecure every teenager is no matter what, nice music and support and letting them know they're good people. . Instead, the opposite has happened. So, the Attorney General and I stood up with many people behind us and said, New York will lead the way to help our children, because when you think about it - and this is why I'm so vested in getting mental health services into our schools - you catch the signs early. You help these young teenagers not have their minds infiltrated with these messages. And just maybe, maybe we can stop the next generation from ending up where the individuals we're trying to help today are. That's how I'm looking at this. This is over a lifetime.

Today I want to talk about some of the other progress we've made. Getting people into the beds has been a crisis. Deinstitutionalization of the 1970s - and I've spoken about this. Why do I know so much about this? To those keeping track: it's personal. What I would say is my family, my parents, were involved in everything including helping people that were on the verge of being sent out in the streets when they started closing the big institutions. And again, we know the stories, the horror stories, that prompted this. People had never lived in society, teenagers, young adults, had no idea how to go to a grocery store. They didn't know what a library was. They couldn't function in society, but they were being thrust out there, thrust out the door. You're on your own. Good luck.

My parents and other people from our community stepped up and we started bringing people into our home. Now, we already had six kids. We didn't have a lot of rooms. We all bunked up. We invited people in like Roger and Melanie, teenagers. I was probably 13. I was told to take them shopping into town and teach them how to buy a hamburger at the local hamburger joint.

I didn't realize I was part of something that might have just helped them feel more normal. To understand they do fit here, with help and love. That has always been part of my life story. To understand that there's people out there who just need a helping hand. And that's what all of you do.

So, we've never built alternative housing for them. Homelessness crisis sprang up. Anybody surprised by that? After deinstitutionalization? So, my predecessors for years were just shutting down psychiatric hospitals, eliminating psychiatric beds, and replacing them with nothing. So, like any other health issue, if you don't treat it, it gets worse and that's why we have so many people on our streets.

One of the reasons you can't get a psychiatric bed, and if you do get a bed, you don't get the support when you leave. We changed all that, because I said we have a moral imperative to finally break this cycle and fill the gaps, and that's what we're talking about.

So why are psychiatric beds so important? And I know they're expensive, and they require specialized training. We heard all about this, and everybody's telling me they can't do it. But I said, when the Budget passed, I promised 150 new beds in state-operated facilities over the next two years.

I'm proud to announce we are way ahead of schedule. As we speak, 99 psychiatric beds are already online and by the end of this year, not two years, this year, we will have 150 already online to take care of people in need of those services.

Also, we keep blaming the pandemic for everything. Well, here's another one. A lot of beds were converted to COVID beds during that crisis, psychiatric beds. But we no longer need those beds. I said, “Bring the beds back online! Hospitals, bring the beds back online!” And they said they would the first year. And they basically did not. Many of them did not. Some did. Many did not. And I said, “Well, why not?” Well, the reimbursements were higher for non-psychiatric beds, so there is a financial disincentive. I said, “Alright, let's look at that, team.” So, we compressed the differential in reimbursements, so you would not use that as an argument. I don't want to leave the hospitals struggling, I need them to open beds.

And because of our efforts, we will have 500 community hospital beds online by the end of this year as well. So, between the state facilities, our community hospitals doing their work now, we'll help them. We'll help them get started. And not only did we launch that higher Medicaid reimbursement, we launched a loan forgiveness program for people to go into the profession because a lot of times, someone will say to me, “We can't open the beds because we don't have enough staff.” Okay. I listen. I listen. I solve problems. I don't just say, “Oh, that's a good reason not to do it, don't worry about it.” You're going to do it, and here's how we're going to help you do it. So, that's how we're focusing on this as well.

But to my friends in the hospital community, those of you who have listened and followed this, I thank you. The rest of you, you are on notice. I said there will be fines. There will be fines if you don't bring these back online in the timetable, we are telling you. Because I can't tell someone that I saw this morning in our subway, “I know you want to get help, you have listened to our SOS teams, you trust them, you're ready to go. But, oh, the hospital's taking too long to bring it back online.” Doesn't work for me. Work for any of you? No. No. We're done. We're done with excuses. Can you tell I'm a little impatient about this? I don't like excuses, right? So, here's what's at stake: people's lives. People's lives are at stake. It's dangerous for them to be out there.

And it's frightening to society as well. People have this perception that something could happen to them at any time, and sometimes it does. We have tounderstand that deep rooted fear that New Yorkers have right now as well. We'll be ultimately judged, maybe not in this life, but definitely in the next, about how we took care of the most vulnerable, the neediest among us. This is our challenge. It's a challenge that I embrace, all of you embrace. We don't run from this. And I'll tell you we are off to a strong start. And this, my friends, is just the beginning. And with that, I want to thank all of you for coming.

Two major milestones have been achieved, but we're at this every single day, and we do it with great partners. I'm proud to introduce Jody Rudin, the President and CEO of the Institute of Community Living, to talk about her experiences on being on the front line as well. Jody Rudin.