Ashwin Vasan

Being around the soft-hearted did wonders for your soul, it turned out, as did feeling needed and useful and missed.

Across town, Ashwin, Ashwin F- uh, the Health Commissioner of New York City at the time, Ashwin Vasan was betting much of his agenda on clubhouses built on the elemental theory that people needed to be needed.

"Mr.

Johnny.

Um, you know, one of my, these f- this, these four characters, you heard Johnny Grimo was one of them, the guy I read at the beginning.

Moses Harper is another, who was Jordan Neely's close friend and mentor in the Michael Jackson dance community.

Um, Ashwin Vasan, the Health Commissioner of New York City, uh, at the time.

Um, and who's my fourth character?

You got Eric Adams, but you also have Donald Trump.

And part of what I think was interesting to me is I have a couple characters in the book, Brian Stetton and Ashwin Vasan.

Brian Stetton was the mayor's mentor.

serious mental illness advisor and pushed a lot of this kind of more forced removal stuff in New York successfully.

Ashwin Vasan is a health commissioner, mental health expert, really took a more progressive approach, kind of like typical progressive policy, which is like, let's do really big things, sweeping things, but like they're going to bloom in like five to 20 years, right? So, I follow the two of them because both of them were thinking in different ways about, look, this is a populist age in which there is a lot of pressure on leaders to give people something now to satisfy these fears, a lot of panic and nerves and stress.

are there ways that you can be real about

that

Maybe that buys him a little political capital to then give me a leash to go do transformational psychosocial rehabilitation, whatever.

These are real, real people who I followed for a couple of years.

One of my four main characters is named Ashwin Vasan.

He was the health commissioner of New York City under the previous mayor, meaning chief doctor of New York City.

He was the first mental health expert to get that job, right? So if you think of public health, you think polio, measles, COVID, shots, sanitation drives, these kinds of things, right? His appointment was an important signal that mental health might be considered sort of public health in a more meaningful way than the past, right? Because we don't normally think about it like that.

They have a, a place where you can get clothes if you have a job interview, right? There's people at varying levels of, uh, of severity.

They have a newspaper, The Fountain House Times.

And the whole theory of Fountain House that-- and that also animated Ashwin Vasan's turn as Commissioner of Public Health in New York City was exactly what you said.

We think of some of these conditions as being biomedical and just beyond the reach of anything besides drugs, but actually, for some people, it is the failure to be needed.

I think I can understand lots of different types of Americans, and a lot of this book is actually using language to do that, so it's not just the facts about them or how they think.

But you're dealing with Daniel Penny's Republican lawyer, and you're dealing with Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner, who's a progressive r- uh, you know, mental health reformer, and you're dealing with outreach workers, you're dealing with homeless folks, you're dealing with cops.

I'm trying to get you into the head of all these kinds of people, not because I like this one or I like this one, or I think you should like this one, but because I actually think there is a real lost civic art in being able to mentally leap into someone else's head and understand the way the world looks to a cop-

Well, also the appre-

Anand is back today, uh, for a closer look at the issue of mental health.

Also with us for this conversation is Dr. Ashwin Vasan.

He served as the 44th commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and was serving in that position when Jordan Neely was killed.

His involvement in the case and efforts to promote mental health are featured in the new book.

Thanks, Anand.

And tickets are of course available for Anand's book event tonight at the 92nd Street Y.

Dr. Ashwin Vasan, thank you very much for being-

Thanks for having me

So who coordinates that? Do we need a new department to coordinate it? Is there already a set-up within city government that can be replicated across the cities that you've talked about?

One of my favorite characters in the book is, and I- I say characters but these are all real people, um, Ashwin Vasan, who's the health commissioner of New York City under the Eric Adams, uh, mayorship of the past.

Because he was mayor while this incident happened.

Yes.

Um, think about when you hear the phrase public health, what do you think about? You think about vaccines, you think about immunization, you think about, you think about, you know, tuberculosis in the past and polio and all these kind of sanitation drives.

And New York has h- you know, AIDS issues where the city has had to have a response to- to a shared health problem.

Ashwin Vasan, uh, who actually used to run Fountain House, the mental health clubhouse, was the first mental health expert.

He's a doctor, but he's a mental health specialist.

And he takes us there and tells the story in a way that allows us as readers to grapple with the difficult details of this debate.

For example, one mental health specialist and New York City health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, emphasizes the need to build a system involving housing, community care, prevention, special education, social connection, accessible mental health services, and the importance of keeping the mentally ill people themselves largely in the driver's seat of deciding how and when to get help.

On the other side of the debate is Brian Stettin, who's a senior advisor on severe mental illness for the city of New York.

And he advocates for a more radical approach, believing that if people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are too sick to accept or even to know that they need help, enforcing court-ordered treatment even under involuntary holds may be the best path to getting someone stable and able to then transition into the system in a way that leads to materially improving their lives.