New York City school kids are losing their minds over the zonked-out drug addicts and raving vagrants they encounter every day and are flocking to therapists to find ways to cope with the stress.
“In neighborhoods such as Hell’s Kitchen a lot of kids are now in therapy,” said mom Katie Hamill, 43, whose 7-year-old daughter is being treated for anxiety. “My daughter has seen everything from fornication, masturbation, defecation, urination, you name it, she has seen it. … consistently and constantly. She is in this constant state of panic.”
Her daughter gets so upset when she sees “dying people” AKA “Junkies” who look dead and have no one helping them.
“My daughter sees far too much vile behavior from adults, including one addict trying to rip out his hair after getting high at a West 42nd Street playground. My kid asks me to move. We have considered leaving the city. It’s hard,” Hamill said.
The city funneled thousands of homeless people to Hell’s Kitchen to living in the area’s hotels after the pandemic started.
The move led to high-profile crimes including the brutal March 2021 beating of a Filipino-American woman walking to church allegedly at the hands of convicted killer Brandon Elliot, 38, who was living at a nearby hotel.
In late August, police charged Nickolas O’Keefe, 33, a shelter resident, with two unprovoked stabbing attacks including one targeting an ER nurse who was knifed in the back.
Major crimes in all three precincts that cover Hell’s Kitchen are up this year, with the surge nearing 60 percent in Midtown North and South. Robberies are up 57% in Midtown South and 20% in Midtown North. There have been 10 murders so far this year in the three precincts, double the number during the same period in 2021.
In Chelsea, mother Cindy Sanders, 47, said her daughter, who attends the city’s Professional Performing Arts High School, saw a therapist through a school program last year for a combination of concerns, including spiraling crime and the sudden proliferation of unhinged hobos.
“I think everything after COVID has added to the amount of stress on them. So it’s very unclear what exactly is causing the stress and anxiety,” Sanders said. “Since they just got back from COVID, the crime rate was higher, and the number of homeless on the streets was higher as well. All of it, I think, in combination created a lot of anxiety.”
Sanders drives her daughters to the West 48th Street school to keep them safe from the legion of aggressive vagrants, but even that didn’t stop them from being harassed recently.
“A woman … started yelling at us in the car. My daughter was nervous about getting out of the car and crossing the street to go to school,” she said.
Sara Pashmforoosh, 40, an architect, who lives in the East Village, said her 19-month-old son constantly sees people smoking crack on their building’s stoop but is unaware of what is happening.
“When he gets older, I’m like, how am I going to explain what they’re doing?” she said.
Therapists say the toxic combination of pandemic stress and daily doses of depravity is creating a veritable Generation Angst in NYC.
“It’s a lot of change and having these people in the neighborhood, that’s a part of that change,” said Dr. Judith Fiona Joseph, a Manhattan psychiatrist who treats children from all over the city. “I do think it’s one of the stressful changes that the post-pandemic era has brought to the city.”
Joseph also noted that children are naturally more empathetic and that “It can be stressful, especially with the sensitive children in my practice, they do voice concerns about seeing people suffering in the streets, people who are not getting treatment and they feel that they want to do something about it.”
Some families are coping by picking up and leaving.
One study found that families with young kids led the flight from major US cities in the first two years of the pandemic. Manhattan saw a 9.5% decline in children under 5 since 2019. Total New York City public school enrollment has dropped by 73,000 since the start of the pandemic.
