Cheer Gov. Hochul for starting to reverse New York’s tragic turn on treating major mental illness
By Post Editorial Board
Published Sep. 21, 2025, 8:06 p.m. ET
Gov. Kathy Hochul deserves kudos for putting the brakes on New York’s decades-long experiment with deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill: She is adding beds to the state’s psychiatric hospitals.
Bravo for acknowledging reality, Governor.
Community-based treatment, supportive housing and mental health homeless shelter policies have had 70 years to prove they can work.
But the city’s streets, subways and jails remain filled with seriously sick people who desperately need real treatment.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute reveals that closing the big mental hospitals in the 1950s and ’60s and steadily eliminating psychiatric hospital beds in the following decades led to “transinstitutionalization” — meaning that those with serious mental illness wound up in other institutions, particularly prisons and jails, but also camped out in public parks or living in homeless shelters, spending their days in libraries and their nights on subway trains.
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https://nypost.com/2025/09/21/opinion/cheer-gov-hochul-for-starting-to-reverse-new-yorks-tragic-turn-on-treating-major-mental-illness/
