Chirlane McCray Brings Mental Health Push to the Pulpit

New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray is on a lobbying tour to call for reform of addiction treatment and to promote the first initiatives of ThriveNYC, the city's $850 million program to bolster the treatment of mental illness.

Over the weekend, McCray took to seven pulpits around the city and called on houses of worship to host training workshops for New Yorkers to better recognize symptoms of mental illness and substance abuse in others. She described the workshops as "mental health first aid training," which, along with testing for postpartum depression and better treatment for opioid addiction, would put the city on the road to better mental health services.

McCray spoke to the congregation at Riverside Church in Manhattan on Sunday and described the initial goals of ThriveNYC, which she and Mayor de Blasio announced in November. She began by saying there are up to 15,000 cases of postpartum depression in New York every year. "It's very common," she said. "We have a number of one in ten who suffer from it, but we actually don't have real data on this because most women don't talk about it. They're afraid to be a bad mom. They're afraid their children might be taken away from them."

McCray said that beginning next fall, every pregnant woman and new mother in New York City will be screened for postpartum depression. She said the screening would consist of a simple set of questions, and added that postpartum depression is usually treatable by counseling or group therapy.

McCray also called for looser restrictions on the number of patients a doctor can treat for opioid addiction. McCray traveled to Washington D.C. last week to promote passage of The TREAT Act (The Recovery Enhancement for Addiction Treatment), which is co-sponsored by Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

"The TREAT Act will make it easier to provide life-saving medications to people who are addicted to opioids," McCray said.

Currently, doctors can prescribe anti-craving medications like methadone and Suboxone to only a limited number of patients. That has led to lengthy waiting lists for prescriptions in places where heroin and pain pill addiction have risen sharply. Since 2013 in New York, deaths by heroin overdose have outpaced murders. The TREAT Act would raise the number of patients that doctors could treat.

In December, the de Blasio administration made the overdose-reversal drug naxalone available in pharmacies without a prescription.