Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces $50 Million to Expand Inpatient Mental Health Services for Children and Adults

Earlier today, Governor Hochul announced the availability of $50 million to help community-based hospitals expand access to mental health treatment for children and adults across New York State. This funding, part of Governor Hochul's $1 billion investment to transform the mental health continuum of care, will allow these facilities to add new inpatient capacity. Governor Hochul also highlighted the proposals in her 2024 State of the State to tackle the youth mental health crisis, including a commitment to open a school-based mental health clinic for every school that wants one.

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

AUDIO of the Governor's remarks 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:

Let's give another round of applause to Athena Matos. She did a great job. I love her energy. Don't you love that energy? Wow. Wow. That's a 1,000-watt light bulb going off. So, you know, let's talk about mental health. Because for too long, no one did. People weren't talking about it when Athena was a young girl, struggling.

There's always been a stigma associated that somehow, we're all supposed to get through life without ever needing help. And there's some sort of weakness or some failure as a human being if you actually say, “I'm struggling, I need some help.” But the reason I'm talking about this literally just days after I spoke about this at great length in my State of the State address is that I'm going to keep talking about it.

And not just talk, but we're going to do something about it once and for all. That's my commitment to New Yorkers. Mental health is now one of the central challenges of our time. I've been here in the Bronx a lot. I love the Bronx. Love the Bronx. It's a great place. Good energy. Lots of people. Lots of great restaurants I visit frequently.

But also, because the Bronx is leading in so much innovative work on this issue. We have great partners. And just a few months ago I sat around with a number of individuals. I sat in a round table listening to stories of people who are struggling and their providers and what they went through, and it was, you know, we didn't have cameras. We don’t want to expose people for their raw moments, but some of our elected were there. I know our Borough President was there and others who shared that experience with me. An experience like that touches me to my soul. To know that there's people that we all represent, that we care about. My God, they're God's people living here in our State.

And they just want someone to understand them. Give them a hand. Not to judge them for decisions they may have made. No one's perfect. But they all need our help. And I listened to them about how state government can help. And I went to another facility to unveil latest investments in our opioid settlement fund.

Because this is also a mental health challenge – because opioids are addictive. They can change the brain chemistry. So, you cannot make the decisions you would have made before. It took us a long time to understand this was always viewed as a failure. And finally, now there's more of an acknowledgement of what is really going on in these individuals.

And I'm proud that our opioid settlement fund has delivered more money faster than any State in the Nation to get out where people need it. And that's what we're going to continue to do. Two days ago, as I said, I stood before the State Legislature. Before the people of New York, and I made a commitment.

I said, “I am committed as Governor of this great State to transforming our mental health system.” For too long it's been defunded, deprioritized, and now we're dealing with the effects. Our children, children who are at their most innocent time, they should just be out playing and enjoying life. Our children – reporting record rates of depression and anxiety. I remember going to a school in Westchester not long ago, up in Yonkers. And I talked to the school psychologist, I said, “What percentage of the students,” – now this is elementary school, Pre-K, Kindergarten, up to fifth grade. I mean, an innocent, simple time in their lives, right?

I said, “What percentage of kids are you dealing with? It must really be the older kids, right?” She said, “40 percent of the children in this school are suffering from mental health challenges now and depression and sadness.” How can that be? We have to help these kids and we have to reckon with it because when someone grows up with this, never gets treated – it gets deeper, untreated illness or addiction and sometimes they lash out and commit crimes, creating fear among the communities where they live. Let's just say that. It happens. I promise to meet this moment with the leadership and action that it deserves because past leaders have failed too long.

Today I'm going to make an announcement that shows clearly how much I intend to make that promise. And I want to thank the leaders from our legislature who joined me in this commitment. They are the true believers. They'll be with me at my side as we continue to do this. I want to thank Manny De Los Santos, our Assemblymember. Thank you for your leadership in this district, truly, thank you.

I want to thank our other Elected Officials who are here, our Borough President. Our Borough President, Vanessa Gibson, has joined us. Luis Sepúlveda, our Senator, has joined us. Senator Gustavo Rivera has joined us, Chairman of the Health Committee, thank you. Assemblymember Chantel Jackson, who knows a little bit about this. Former Councilmember Marjorie Velázquez. Marjorie here? I didn't know if I saw you here or not. Okay. And many of our advocates, as well as Ann Marie Sullivan, the Commissioner of the Office of Mental Health. Commissioners don't usually get applause like that. I mean, Commissioner, that's a big deal. I go all over the State. I mean – let's do that again for her. She deserves that. She deserves that. She works so hard. I also – you heard from Athena. And I also will be soon – in a few moments, we'll be hearing from Dr. Warren, who's the I'm the Medical Director of Outpatient Behavioral Health here at Columbia, at the Columbia Medical Center. I want to thank all of them.

So, let's get back to what we're talking about here. I talked about New Yorkers who are suffering, wrestling with isolation, addiction, self-harm, depression, and we know it only gets worse if you don't treat it. So, here's what we're going to do. I'm making sweeping investments. What we want to do is help people when they need it most.

Last year, we talked about a $1 billion investment. $1 billion, first time ever, more than any State in the Nation is committed to solving this problem. I knew we wouldn't solve it in one year, that's impossible. But we're starting to. We've increased mental health care funding by 33 percent in just two years. That's how you make up for lost time. We have targeted hundreds of millions of dollars toward outpatient community-based services. We've created over 3,500 housing units. Imagine that 3,500 people at one time can now get the help they need in a controlled setting with professionals and make sure they don't leave until they're on a path to recovery. That's the difference we're making.

We're also going to be increasing our inpatient capacity as well by 1,000 more beds and helping our kids, helping them with eating disorders and more school-based mental health clinics because parents can't take time off their jobs and take the kids to an appointment that might be 11 o'clock in the morning. That doesn't work. You do it in school where the kids are. That's where they're showing up every day. We do it in our schools. Because guess what? These kids, and it's not just the teenagers, but they're considering suicide at rates that were never even talked about before. Twice as high as a decade ago. What happened? I think historians will look back and maybe perhaps because of the pandemic. The advent of social media emerging at the same time, and this is almost a lost decade.

When kids are twice as likely, now, twice as many more children are likely to want to commit suicide. I do believe social media has been a huge factor. That's why support stands side by side with our Attorney General, Tish James, and we're demanding more accountability from social media companies. It's not just for one day press conference. We are going to be relentless in pursuing this and advancing legislation to protect children's privacy and regulate the toxic, addictive algorithms that if you don't understand how this works, it is deeply sinister. How there are people trying to figure out how to keep your child's attention even longer and take them to dark places.

They may look up something that says suicide because they're trying to figure out how not to commit suicide and there's algorithms that tell them how to do it. That is detestable. And I'm sick and tired of those influences. The influence should be the parents, the teachers, the neighbors, the clergy, the religious foundation, peers, not these dark forces that are lurking out there trying to capture your child's mind. And that's how serious this is.

And I mentioned COVID. As adults, we're thinking, “Well that was so 2020, 2021, we've moved on, right?” You know who does not have the developed coping skills that adults have? The kids. I've sat with kids in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in the Bronx. Listen to them. Let them be honest with me. And they're still talking about it as if it's still going on, or it was just yesterday. They've not escaped the clutches of this time in their lives when they were supposed to be kids, or at a high school meeting, friends, or having that prom and going to some games and graduating. They lost all that. It was robbed from them. And we as adults are, “Yeah, you know, you didn't get some prom pictures, it's okay.” That's not what happened to these kids. They spiraled. And they don't just come back because someone declared the pandemic over. That didn't happen. We know that now.

Since the pandemic, we've seen an uptick of over 70 percent, a 70 percent uptick in kids going to school-based mental health clinics. Now that's a shocking statistic, except when you realize a lot of schools don't have mental health clinics. So, these are the ones where it's available. What about those kids that don't even have that waiting for them? What happens to them? That's why my commitment goes deep. I'm committing to provide mental health services to every school aged child who needs it. And every school that wants a mental health clinic will get one. And there's a program called the Youth Act. It's a great program. It's a first in the nation. It allows kids to stay in their schools and communities when they do need serious help. Investing in them, helping them grow healthier and happier.

We talk about the kids. A lot of adults. A lot of adults are struggling. And some of them have their own kids. And their own kids see them spiraling and kids don't get that foundation of love and adults who act like adults, because they need their own help. That's another tragedy, it's the trauma that can go on for a generation. And how does that stop? Too many adults grew up with environments of neglect without the help they need. We have people like Athena who broke out of it. That's a powerful story. And she's there helping those who have not been able to break out of it. She's there to help them now. And they can pose a danger to themselves. We have to recognize that, and that's why we have to change our behavioral health system overall.

Under our proposals, hospitals will be required to screen people for mental health conditions before they're discharged and require follow up psychiatric care and coordinate it before they leave. Don't just say, “We took care of you for 24-48 hours. We're done. You look okay. Good luck.” That doesn't work. That's just inviting them back again, except next time there might not be a bed available, and they'll just be out there on the streets.

We need to expand, also, mental health courts, because so many people circle in and out of the criminal justice system.

Empower court-based mental health specialists who see in real-time with their training, their knowledge, they know what's going on. We can't expect our court personnel and our judges to know all this. And I also want to create 200 best-in-class inpatient beds, be a model for others, and transition more people to homes, specialized permanent housing.

Now, one would say, well I have insurance, isn't that supposed to cover everything? Guess what? They have not been doing this. Insurance companies, and many are doing the right thing, and there are others who are not. They're finding every way they can to evade covering you. You pay in all these years, your employer pays in, somebody's paying in, and now when you want to draw down and get help you need, well, we don't have a provider that's in network, these are our providers, but you call through the list of ten, and they actually don't really exist anymore, and at some point you say, I've got to get back to my job, I can't spend my day trying to find a provider.

That's the reality of people. That's life. No New Yorker should be deprived of care because insurance companies won't cover it. I'm going to make sure they pay, make sure their list of providers is up-to-date and accurate. That those are real people, not just names and an address and a phone number that don't exist.

I'm also going to keep confronting that opioid crisis, the epidemic that it is, with the urgency it demands. As I said, we've led our nation in dispersing over $190 million already, and there's more to come. But I need to bolster our workforce, as well. I need more people in this field. That's a challenge as well.

Now, the good news is we're talking about it. We're focusing on it. People are saying, yeah, I guess I do need help, and now the insurance company will pay for it. But what if there's no one out there because our workforce has been depleted? We lost a lot of people during the pandemic. Good, hardworking people dedicated themselves to helping others.

Some lost their lives because they were on the front line. Others just said I can't do this anymore. I'm exposing my family. We know what happened to the healthcare workforce overall. We've been talking about that.

We have to expand our workforce of addiction treatment professionals and expand our outreach street efforts. Go where the people are. Distribute the Naloxone, and the Fentanyl and Xylazine test strips. We know they save lives. So, we have a lot of ambition.

Tackling this crisis is at the top of my priorities, which is why this is the first place I've come since we unveiled our State of the State. And I want to make sure it's happening.

So, starting today I want to announce something. Already, I want more community-based hospitals to open more inpatient beds, and what I'm doing today is announcing $50 million is now available to community-based hospitals who are working to increase their psychiatric capacity. $50 million is going out.

Now, what can this be used for? Literally, they can buy new property, expand facilities, cover construction costs. Because we can say we want more beds, but if you don't make the buildings bigger or add more capacity it's not going to happen. So, we're really taking this down to the nuts and bolts. Money is needed to build more. It's real simple. A commonsense measure that'll help us deliver real results.

Let me close with this. I'm so proud to work with the New York City Children's Center and the Bronx Psychiatric Center campus. This is a state-run facility. These are state workers. When I think about my state workforce, I'm proud of every one of them.

But I want all of the people who work here to stand up, take a bow, and let us thank you for what you do every single day, saving lives, giving people hope.

And Dr. Sullivan and all your team, they have over 550 people. Dedicated, and hardworking, they treat several thousand youth and their families every single year.

This is a place where futures change. You give them hope, you give them love, you give them compassion. And as your Governor, I could not be prouder of what you do and that you've dedicated your life to serving others. That's what we're called on this earth to do. We all have to give in some way. We all have to make this place better, and all of you are doing it in a very direct, profound way, so I say thank you.

All of us agree, that no New Yorker should feel abandoned, tossed aside, that there's not a pathway to recovery, and every child has to be given the tools to succeed. They have to. Because that's what we're going to continue to do to make this the greatest state in the nation because we're investing in our people.

And it starts in places like this. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for participating today. Thank you for being here. And with that, let me bring up Dr. Warren Ng to talk to you more about the work that he is doing to help our people recover. Dr. Ng.