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To the editor:
New Yorkers have concerns about the plight of people they encounter apparently suffering from serious mental health issues. They question why those so terribly afflicted are not getting seemingly crucial help, sometimes with fatal consequences. Is part of the problem both the loss of places for ill people to get appropriate treatment and the lack of community input into the loss of those facilities?
A component of patient treatment plans for people with severe mental illness is sometimes hospitalization. But in NYC, inpatient beds for those patients have been disappearing. The next inpatient beds scheduled to go are those of Beth Israel Hospital on the Lower East Side. Amid community and official protests, 64 inpatient psychiatric beds will be gone when the hospital closes. That will add to the loss of 506 psychiatric inpatient beds, or 11.2 percent in New York City, in the last ten years.
On De. 13, Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill fostering greater community input into hospital closures. Many think that the continuing closure of hospitals, without sufficient community input, conveying the local situation on the ground, rather than the view from Albany, is a problem.
Helen Northmore
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