Email | Print

Councilwoman Margarita Lopez serves in the New York City Council, representing the Lower East Side of Manhattan and surrounding areas. She chairs the Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, and Disability Services Committee. During her conversation with City Voices, she spoke with fierceness over some issues affecting the mental health, LGBT and Latino communities.

Voices: How did you get involved with the mental health community?

Margarita Lopez: Two people who suffered from schizophrenia lived on my block. My mother always taught us that these people were good people, but that they understood life in a different way and that we needed to understand that. When I became an adult, I realized…that every person who is mentally ill is a person who is healthy, wonderful, and great and that you should love them and care for them.

Voices: What is one of your most pressing issues right now?

ML: The State is planning to put a piece of legislation that is going to destroy the psychosocial clubs, the clinics, the entire network that we have created in the mental health system in the city. That proposal is called PROS (Personalized Recovery Oriented Services). As I was looking at the proposal, I became very alarmed and called for a meeting. We're going to have the first hearing on PROS on September 27. If the community doesn't mobilize on this, the network that we have created is going to be dismantled. That hearing will be the beginning of it to put this coalition together to fight back. As of right now, we are dissected in pieces.

In NYC, tax-levy dollars for the police and fire departments [are] on the increase, but services for people with mental illness are going down and that's not right.

Voices: Only a handful of mental health housing programs in the city provide units for couples and families. And of those few, a number of agencies place restrictive limitations like demanding that both partners be seriously mentally ill or that the couple be legally married. Is there a way to fix this injustice?

ML: Not everybody is single without the possibility of a boyfriend, girlfriend, wife or husband. We need to begin organizing and creating the kind of housing that will allow [for] that.

Voices: How can we stop the New York Police Department from using deadly force when responding to emergency EDP (emotionally disturbed person) calls?

ML: I think it's time for the community of people with mental illness to organize themselves and create a citywide committee that demands changes in the police subculture [as to] how they address [an EDP] call. Anyone [in our] field knows that most [likely] the [EDP] is not going to harm anybody. But [it] is a possibility. The police are called [as a] last resort. Why [do] the police misunderstand? Why [do] people in general misunderstand when they see a person with mental illness out of control? It's lack of education. It's time for the community of people with the illnesses to form a committee to defend their rights. We are not free of bigotry yet. The only way that we are going to be free of it is [when] the community organizes themselves on this issue separate and apart from the advocates.

Voices: Is NYC providing proper discharge plans to mentally ill inmates who are sent back to the community from Riker's Island?

ML: Absolutely not. We had to sue them. [The] Brad H. case had to be put in place. And still to this day I have not seen this discharge planning working appropriately or adequately.

Voices: Would you improve the Brooklyn Mental Health Court in any way to help it achieve its goal of providing alternatives to incarceration for mental health consumers who commit felonies?

ML: Before I say that I would improve it, I will say that we need to congratulate the district attorney (D.A.) of Brooklyn for putting this together. At least acknowledge D.A. Charles Hynes for creating the program because that means that [he] understands that people who suffer from mental illness and violate the law or engage in behavior that [gets them] arrested should [not necessarily] be processed in the same way that everybody else is processed. We need to say thank you Charles Hynes for what [he] did. Can the office be improved? Absolutely. And we should work with the D.A.'s office in Brooklyn to give him those recommendations. [We should] demand that D.A. Morgenthau in Manhattan create the same office, demand that Johnson in the Bronx and Brown in Queens [do the same] before [we] simply criticize Charles Hynes.

Voices: Where do you stand on the issue of court-ordered, forced ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatments?

ML: I am a firm believer on your right to control your own body. I am of the belief that [forced ECT] is infringing into human rights and privacy. If a person doesn't want to receive this kind of medical treatment, the person should not be forced to it. If the person is harming himself or others, then the state has a responsibility to protect the person and others, not by [forcing] ECT, but by giving them the appropriate hospitalization facility until they are stabile.

Voices: Suicide rates in LGBT youth are higher than for the general population. What has the City Council done to address this problem, especially the depression, suicide and trauma associated with the coming-out process?

ML: It's a fine road that we have to walk here. It doesn't have anything to do with being gay. It has everything to do with the prejudice and bigotry that exists against the gay community—that it's not allowed to develop and to exist like everybody else. If you allow [gay youth] to be able to be in the same healthy environment, with the support system that is provided to a heterosexual teenager, we will excel. The disparity in the numbers that we see will not exist. The way to deal with this problem is to begin creating conscience [and eliminate] bigotry, then you will see a reduction in the consequences of bigotry.

Voices: How can the City Council help to ensure that LGBT people with mental illness receive culturally-competent treatment?

ML: The subculture of the gay community is something that you have to acknowledge and admit to even if you don't want to—even if you are George Bush who hates gay people and wants to see us disappear. The policy of culturally-competent care comes directly from the federal government. We have in the White House a President who despises and hates the gay community. How do you expect the policies of culturally-competent care [to] include us if what's coming from there is a clear message that [the President] wants us to disappear? The work begins over there. It begins in the White House and [with the] President controlling these policies.

Voices: What are the major challenges pertaining to the mental health of the Latino community and what is the City Council doing to address them?

ML: The Latino community continues to take the position of perceiving and understanding themselves as outsiders. [Once we realize] that as American citizens we are entitled to be treated as equals, as soon as we embrace that concept, things will change for us. The day that we begin saying, "We demand to be part of [the decision-making]," the power will rely then on us. We'll be able to stand up and be part of the process and get inside the structures of power. But so far, what we do is to operate from an outsider mentality and we are not outsiders—we are Americans.

What can the City Council do? In the mental health committee, I have been holding hearings for two years demanding that this process be a process of inclusion, but I have not had a lot of cooperation.