New York’s broken mental health system pressures doctors to release severely psychotic patients — and likely played a direct role in the horrific attack on a tourist and her baby this week in Macy’s Herald Square, insiders and other critics told The Post Saturday.
The suspect — an apparently deranged woman who was allowed to leave a Manhattan psychiatric facility without supervision — traveled alone to the famed department store, bought a kitchen knife and allegedly stabbed an unsuspecting mother as she changed her infant in a bathroom, authorities said.
Kerri Aherne insisted to The Post that “voices” in her head ordered her to “kill.”
“Somebody determined that this woman wasn’t a danger to herself or others – this is the whole problem!” said a doctor who works in New York-based mental hospitals.
Facilities are incentivized to release patients, the source said.
“The state has to pay out of their pocket to house them. It costs a lot of money… If they discharge them, it shows that they’re doing a great job.”
“The administration is telling us we gotta get people out. There’s a psychiatrist who is an administrator who walks around yelling, ‘You’re not letting enough people out.’ They call her the mob boss,” claimed the source, without being specific.
Aherne, 43, had been in the state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center for a year before the incident and had just been released to transitional housing, she said.
The victim, 38, had been holiday shopping at Macy’s with her husband and children and was repeatedly hacked in the back, shoulder, and arm with the knife.
The hospital source said patients in transitional housing like Aherne are still supervised — but not very well.
“They’re pushing patients out … but they’ll go to transitional housing, which is also on our campus,” said the source.
“The transitional housing is across from the hospital. That’s the facility where they had a broken door for two years. You know, they don’t fix stuff. The executive director never fixes anything.”
Mayor Adams told The Post Saturday his “thoughts” are with the victim and her family — but added the sadistic attack should have never happened.
“This type of situation is exactly why our administration fought so hard to expand authority to conduct involuntary removals to more clinicians, while pushing for comprehensive evaluations that fully assess an individual’s history and risk before discharge,” said the moderate Democrat, whose term expires at year’s end.
“And why it’s vitally important that the incoming administration [to be run by socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani] doesn’t throw away that authority and continues these efforts.”
Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches homelessness and mental illness issues, said high healthcare costs and a lack of psychiatric beds are crippling the system.
“New York State has a legendary reputation for figuring out how to bill all kinds of things to the federal Medicaid program,” he said.
“Psychiatric beds cannot be billed to Medicaid, meaning they can’t push part of the cost to the federal government, and that creates the special pressure within the inpatient psych system that doesn’t exist throughout much of the normal health system.”
The average cost to house a psych patient in a state facility per day is $1,571 for adults who are part of the legal system, and $1,386 for the rest, according to a September report Eide published on inpatient mental health care.
Gov. Hochul is “heartbroken by this terrible attack and is praying for the full recovery of the victim,” spokesperson Nicolette Simmond said in a statement, adding, “our administration is thoroughly reviewing this matter.”
The state Office of Mental Health – which oversees Manhattan Psychiatric Center – said confidentiality laws prevent it from discussing the case.
“Our facilities follow all laws and procedures when it comes to patient intake, care and discharges,” added its spokesperson Justin Mason.
Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said there’s a lack of accountability in such cases.
“We never hear anything about what went wrong, who made the decision to let this go?” he said.
“If the Police Department did something, there would be people pulling the cops back; they’d be looking into all this stuff,” he contended.
“So why aren’t we doing the same with the psychologists, the psychiatrists, and the doctors who make these decisions that put these dangerous people back on the streets?”
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