Politics

By Haley Brown

Small mental health day centers in the Big Apple are getting squeezed out to make way for much larger, less personal day centers — a move that is backed by top city officials but has some experts worries.

Over the past two decades, mentally ill New Yorkers have relied on up to 16 city-funded “clubhouses” — or day centers that connect them with community, art therapy and sometimes jobs.

But come July, nine of the existing clubhouses around the five boroughs will be ineligible for funding because of the Adams administration’s move to consolidate services to 13 larger clubhouses by the fall.

“I, like everybody else, question the move to larger clubhouses,” Joel Corcoran, executive director at Clubhouse International, the accrediting agency for clubhouses, told The Post. “There’s no conclusion that big clubhouses are better.”

The questionable pivot limits access to the $30 million pot to cover the cost of these centers to places that can serve 300 or more members on a daily basis.

“I’ve spoken with (the city) about that and their commitment is to reach more people living with mental illness through accredited clubhouses,” Corcoran said. “Of course we are concerned about the smaller clubhouses that did not receive contracts and the impact for the people who are involved with those.”

The Health Department estimates around 5,000 mentally ill New Yorkers benefit from these clubhouses on a daily basis, and the consolidation to larger community centers will add another 3,750 to clubhouse rosters.

But Corcoran is also puzzled by the city’s ambitious timeline to implement the new contracts.

At least six of the 13 contracts were awarded to providers who did not have a location yet, two people familiar with the contract’s RFP process who asked to remain anonymous told The Post.

“We’re concerned about the implementation because the numbers are so high and the timeframes are so fast,” Corcoran said.

Health commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is working with existing members who will lose their clubhouses.

“We have made a commitment to every organization to support every single member where we can, whether it be things like metro cards or transportation or telecommunications,” Vasan said.

A department source told The Post the health department plans to work with providers to create a roster of active members to “determine how they plan to ensure continuity of engagement.”

Lawrence Fowler, executive director of Rainbow Clubhouse, which boasts an active membership of 150 members and was not awarded a new contract, said some members are suffering from illnesses that do not allow them to easily switch clubhouses.

“Inherent in some of those diagnoses are people who are withdrawn, people who are not comfortable in larger spaces and people who are looking to redevelop themselves so they can join a larger community,” Fowler told The Post.

“From a government perspective there may be this notion that bigger is better,” Fowler said. 

“But it feels as if they’re removing the community aspect of the clubhouse and they want to build a bunch of mega-houses and put them in a mall-type of environment.”

Several clubhouse advocates told The Post they are concerned Vasan is leaning too much on his past experience at Fountain House, the largest clubhouse provider in the city – where Vasan worked as CEO from September 2019 to January 2022. 

At a City Council hearing in March, Vasan denied having anything to do with the request for proposals that was put out by the department last fall. But many clubhouse insiders still blame the commissioner for the city’s newfound focus on large clubhouses at the expense of the smaller ones.

“It’s a conflict of interest,” said Dice Cooper, director of Lifelinks clubhouse in Queens, one of nine smaller clubhouses that did not get its contract renewed.

“They said we have to have more than 300 members. Who benefits from that? Fountain House,” Cooper told The Post. “What (Vasan) fails to realize is that there are 349 clubhouses in the world. Only three have an active membership of more than 300,” Cooper said.

“It’s surprising on some level that someone who worked at Fountain House would take the position that eliminating clubhouses would have any value,” Fowler said.

Two people who worked with Vasan at Fountain House – one current and one former employee – said the commissioner doesn’t understand the clubhouse model because he never embraced the programming at Fountain House.

“He’s not a people person,” one longtime Fountain House employee told The Post. “Everytime he would see the members or the staff, he would, like, run from us.”

The clubhouse model thrives on community so members invited Vasan to community meetings, raffles and the Christmas party during the two years he worked there, but Vasan never showed, they claimed.

“They used to beg him to come, to talk. Because the members needed that connection,” the employee said. “He had no clue what we do there, and he didn’t want to become part of it.”

When members and staff spent weeks preparing a skit just for Vasan, shortly into the skit, Vasan took a phone call and left.

“It wasn’t even 10 minutes. We were just starting the presentation and he said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve got a very important call, a very important meeting’. And he left and never came back. That was the kind of shit that he would do.”

“It made everybody feel terrible. It was this constant pleading for him to, like, be a part of it.”

Vasan told The Post the arrival of the Covid pandemic a few months into his tenure is what kept him from being hands-on with the members at Fountain House.

“That’s a very hard thing to do. When you have a community that’s built on bringing people together in physical community and then you say we can’t do that anymore because of the pandemic, that was very hard on the community,” Vasan said.

The same employee and another former Fountain House employee said Vasan was tasked during his tenure with expanding Fountain House to other states through an initiative called Fountain House America.

The initiative was canceled after Vasan left, according to the employees, but Fountain House continues expanding under the name Fountain House United. The mental health giant has a contract with LA County to open a clubhouse in Hollywood this summer.

“I was hired by the board principally to expand the model, and we were very successful in doing that,” Vasan said.

Jonathan Glass, 50, has been a member at Fountain House for 24 years. He said during Vasan’s tenure and since Fountain House has become less community-oriented.

“It’s very clinical and it’s not the same clubhouse that I experienced for 24 years,” Glass told The Post. “The more I’m there the more sickened I get from the distance I feel from the people.”

Vasan steered clear of addressing any member directly but told The Post, “Things happen within the community and they’re usually dealt with inside the community.”

Vasan said he still remembered two members at Fountain House from his time there, one member who greets people at the door and another who facilitates tours.

Vasan said the elimination of some of the clubhouses is meant to improve the system.

“The entire intention here is not to take away any one community or impair anyone’s recovery but to also ensure that everyone has access to this incredible model,” Vasan said.

“It’s not really about big or small. It’s about capacity and resources to provide the array of rehabilitative services that a clubhouse needs,” Vasan said.

Vasan said clubhouses with more resources will be able to collect more robust data on their members to improve the clubhouse model.

“Other sources of funding, other sources of support and policy will continue to treat the clubhouse model as a cute afterthought unless data is compelling about how it is transforming our mental health system,” Vasan said.

But while the city is focused on data collection, Cooper is worried about the thousands of members who he said will have no place to go after the nine clubhouses lose their city funding.

“If you have all of those services completely taken away from you, it’s going to be a complete disaster. You’ll see more homeless people in the subways, more homeless people in the neighborhoods. You’ll have people who go back into the hospitals. It’s just going to be really, really devastating for those individuals who don’t have a place to go and who no one is paying attention to,” Cooper said.

Ruben Fernandez, 61, describes himself as an “Average Joe.” The former marine started going to Lifelinks, which did not get a contract, three years ago after he suffered heart failure and could no longer work at his job in facilities at NYU as he had for years. 

Now Fernandez is worried the thing that helped him get better will be taken away.

“One minute I’m at NYU making six figures and the next minute I have heart failure. That heart failure caused such big depression and isolation. And then I found out about the clubhouse. It’s helped me in so many ways,” said Fernandez, who now goes to Yankees games with his fellow members.

“The clubhouse is the glue holding a lot of people together,” Fernandez said. “If they close the clubhouse, it’s going to be a lot of lost people looking for a place they can go to.”

A statement from the Department said, in part, “this is the start, not the end. The Health Department is working closely with the Clubhouse providers on developing transition plans for current members that is as seamless as possible.”