The Struggle to Treat Mentally Ill People on the Street

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a program to treat severely mentally ill people on the streets — and why an audit says the city is not doing enough to see that it is getting results. We will also find out why 16- and 17-year-olds in Newark will not get to vote as soon as they had hoped.

New York City spends millions on a program to treat severely mentally ill people on the streets and in the subways. An audit by the city comptroller found that city was doing little to see that the program, known as intensive mobile treatment, or I.M.T., was getting results.

The audit follows a New York Times investigation that documented widespread breakdowns in the city’s mental health care system for homeless people, including some among treatment teams that are often overworked and underpaid.

I asked Jan Ransom, who with Amy Julia Harris wrote The Times’s stories on the problems with the system, about the audit as well as their reporting.

The audit showed that the city had been pouring money into this program without checking to see if it was actually working.