A relatively normal day with the streets bustling, the sun out, and December and the holidays coming around. 

   The month of giving, celebration, and love is almost right upon us.

    And Mayor Eric Adams has given a gift to all mentally ill people in New York City!

    The gift of seizing their rights unequivocally, without restraint or consideration of the duality of the situation!

    New York Mayor Eric Adams on November 29, 2022, announced that police officers can force people to have sensitive psychiatric evaluations on the belief that they are a danger to others even when they have not done anything to suggest such an assumption. In addition, these people can be forced to be entrapped in a psychiatric hospital without their or a court’s permission (“Housing in Brief”). 

    Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Katy Hochul, what happened to the fifth amendment due process clause of “No one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without the due process of law.” 

    These mentally ill people are being deprived of the right to life and liberty, as their freedom to make their own decisions are stolen away from them on the crux of them being inherently incompetent to decide their existence. 

    There are no safeguards to ensure that the rights of the mentally ill people of New York City are protected.  

     Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Katy Hochul, I applaud you for trying to remedy our society’s failings regardings mental health.

     However, the current plan promises to be a failed solution to one of the most important challenges that confront our nation.  

      We do not need to promote the fallacy that all mentally ill people by nature need to be isolated and ostracized from society. This false fear that mentally ill people can’t coexist in society and are destined to be dangerous  to others and to society itself is endorsed by Eric Adams’s plan. 

    Instead of this misguided plan, we need to increase access to counseling by making it law that healthcare insurers have to cover therapy. We need free government counseling to be available to the general public in the United States. 

    We need to promote, spread and reduce the fallacy that working on your mental health, taking medicine, or going to therapy is for those who are insane. 

    We need to create more low-cost housing, job, and educational opportunities for both mentally ill people and the general public at large.  

    We need to improve our efforts to combat the mental health struggles and labor and housing inequalities in our nation. But we cannot afford to follow Eric Adam’s plan of conducting a witch hunt to find and put people struggling with mental illness in hospitals without their permission.