NYC Thrive continues sending city money and services into the void

 

THE CITY

In the fall of 2017, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene signed a contract to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to rehab a 14,000-square-foot former IRS office inside an anonymous beige Bronx building covered with graffiti.

The project was part of a key criminal justice reform Mayor Bill de Blasio adopted in 2014. The idea: to create state-of-the-art “diversion centers” staffed by mental health experts where police could drop off people experiencing mental health crises instead of escorting them to hospital ERs or jail — institutions ill-equipped to deal with their needs.

The city committed $52 million to fix up and run the Bronx facility for a decade. But nearly four years later, the place sits empty.

Meanwhile, the city dedicated $51 million to a similar operation in East Harlem that opened this past November. The number of people brought in for help so far: 45, or $1.1 million per visit.

Diversion centers eventually became part of the Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC, a broader program run by de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, to improve the lives of New Yorkers struggling with mental health issues.

ThriveNYC has come under fire for costs upwards of $1 billion and for the administration’s inability to provide evidence the program is working. Last week, de Blasio rebranded ThriveNYC — changing its name to the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.

The purpose behind diversion centers was to stop cycling people with mental illness through the criminal justice system instead of getting them treatment and other services.

Meanwhile, deadly encounters between NYPD officers and people in emotional distress have led to 18 fatalities in the last five years — driving demands to remove cops from the equation.

Even as the diversion centers sit empty or underused, de Blasio made the surprise announcement April 29 that another $112 million would be spent on a new program to pair EMT teams with social workers to handle 911 calls citywide about people having a breakdown, without sending police.

EMTs, though, aren’t signing up in big numbers.

You can say the only diversion center that actually functions in this city is de Blasio and McCray's joint mayoralty budget money laundering apparatus in City Hall.

The Blaz adds Thrive to permanent government

 

NY Post

In trouble? Try a rebranding.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has quietly moved to rename and make permanent first lady Chirlane McCray’s embattled billion-dollar ThriveNYC mental health initiative, shifting the program into City Hall and creating the Office of Community Mental Health to house it.

De Blasio signed the executive orders inking the changes without fanfare on Wednesday, a few days after the initial announcement was buried by the news of sexual harassment allegations leveled against city Comptroller Scott Stringer.

The transition was swift.

The next day, City Hall sent a press release that identified ThriveNYC’s top honcho, Susan Herman, as the “director” of the new Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.

ThriveNYC went entirely unmentioned in the Thursday statement, though the email address for inquiries from the press still used the ‘thrive.nyc.gov’ domain. 

 Meanwhile, the website for McCray’s controversy-scarred initiative quietly added a banner to the top that reads: “We’re becoming the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health. Learn Why.”

It’s a far different picture than the one painted by Hizzoner and McCray as they rolled out the new office during his daily press briefing on April 29.

“And third, we want this work to deepen and we want to make sure it’s community focused. So, [we’re] establishing a permanent Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health,” said de Blasio during that morning press briefing.

“In the end, the way to reach people with mental health challenges is early and often – it’s schools, it’s at community-based organizations, it’s in shelters, it’s in so places where people need help, but, historically, have not had a place to turn,” he continued. “This vision and this office will ensure that mental health services are available at the grassroots all over the city.” 

You know what this means right? This means Chirlie is not leaving. Tweed-le Dumb.

Chirlane McCray wants you to get your ass kicked or killed for THRIVE

 Impunity City

 Looks like Chirlane McCray de Blasio as a major problem. In the umpteenth pathetic attempt to justify the existence of the city’s THRIVE mental health program and administrative office, Chirlie’s idiot husband has decided to draw back the NYPD from responding to emergency complaints regarding people having dangerous mental episodes replace them with “violence interrupter” social workers and counselors to quell these situations. Just one problem, the city is having trouble hiring people to take this job, even with the decent government salary and guaranteed health insurance.

Well, Chirlie’s got an answer to that little conundrum and has decided to add another mission to her program by also having people interrupt violent outcomes from racial and xenophobic bias attacks. Apparently, because of the low interest to work for THRIVE, she is outsourcing these tasks to citizens and gave a brief orientation on her government twitter account. Sourcing instructions from some account she follows, she lays out 5 D’s in what to do when the situation arises as you are commuting to work, waiting for your train on the subway or hanging out on the street or park.

Chirlane McCray's crazy, ineffective mental health program has cost the city close to a billion dollars and projected to cost another billion more

NY Post

Chirlane McCray’s mental health initiative is on track to spend $1 billion over five years — but city officials can’t provide a detailed breakdown or prove it’s making a positive difference, it was disclosed Wednesday.

The revelations came at a City Council hearing where legislators panned the first lady’s “Thrive” initiative for its slow response time and failure to treat the city’s mentally ill homeless.
“
I like the fact that money is going toward mental health, but when they say we’re seeing a benefit in all areas, I take exception to that, because I don’t see it everywhere,” Queens Councilman Robert Holden told The Post. “I’m not sure anybody does.”

Under pressure from Holden and fellow members of the council’s mental health committee, Thrive director Susan Herman admitted that the program — budgeted for a total $850 million between fiscal years 2016 and 2019 — will now cost $1 billion every four years.

She said Thrive would receive $250 million a year going forward, including $2 million to cover its 21 office staffers.

Politico

Since its inception in 2015, ThriveNYC — the city's sprawling $850 million initiative to address a variety of mental health issues — has operated without much scrutiny or accountability.

With few public metrics by which to measure its success so far, and the broad strokes used by city officials to describe its operations, the city has offered little insight into how it has assessed Thrive's efficacy since it began.

And because Thrive encompasses a variety of initiatives — some new, some already in existence — across more than a dozen agencies, it is difficult to establish a central, line-item budget delineating how the city is spending taxpayer dollars on the program. 

 Representatives from four advocacy and service organizations said that Thrive does not fund greater access to inpatient treatment or intensive outpatient services for those with serious mental illnesses, further burdening the social safety net.

“Thrive NYC is really best understood as a ‘tale of two cities’ initiative,” said Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and an expert on homelessness and urban policy. “It’s about trying to give people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged access to the same kind of mental health care that people in upper middle income or affluent communities have enjoyed as a matter of course for a very long time.”

But that kind of programming won’t address institutional problems like homelessness and serious mental illness, which are financial and safety burdens to the city, he said.
I
f we’re not addressing those two problems, then whatever we are doing is lacking,” Eide said.
McCray acknowledged in October 2018 that the city does not often discuss Thrive’s programming for violent individuals due to stigma.

“It promotes that misconception that too many people have, that people who have mental illness or people suffering from substance use disorders are violent, which is not true,” she said at a health care conference. 

The Post also has a biting editorial on Chirlie and Butthead and used my own description of her  anointed position in city hall to excoriate her profligate spending.