The least revolutionary plans that New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani advanced on the campaign trail dealt with mental illness. The most likely outcome of these plans is that taxpayers pay more for slightly worse outcomes and slightly worse mental-health services—with more untreated serious mental illness on the subways and streets as a result.
Mamdani’s mental-health policy seems to have been inspired by former mayor Bill de Blasio, of whom the mayor-elect is a fan. Under de Blasio, the city burned more than $1 billion on ThriveNYC, a mental-health bureaucracy that offered an array of wellness programs but did little for the seriously mentally ill. While Mayor Eric Adams laudably prioritized untreated serious mental illness during his one term, he did not abandon ThriveNYC programming, which Mamdani is rebranding as part of his “Department of Community Safety.”
The lack of novelty is apparent in Mamdani’s most talked about mental-health proposal: deploying social workers instead of cops in response to emotionally disturbed person calls. New York City has experimented with non-cop and “co-response” teams since 2021, with mixed results…