First Lady Chirlane McCray offered a gripping account of her own thoughts of suicide — fueled by racist bullying she endured as a child — as she kicked off her annual mental-health conference Monday.
McCray described to the audience the torment she endured as one of the only black children growing up in Longmeadow, Mass., in the 1960s: Her classmates mocked her skin color, teachers refused to have her in their classrooms, and construction workers spit at her as she rode her bike.
“I didn’t know how to handle all that,” she vividly recalled Monday during her keynote at the Thrive conference at New York Law School.
“I was afraid, I was lonely, I was anxious and so often I just wanted to die,” she said, pausing before continuing her 15-minute address.
“It wasn’t until years later, when I started working on my own mental-health challenges, anxiety and substance misuse,” she added, referring to her past use of marijuana, “that I realized my parents probably suffered, too, from untreated depression.”
It’s the first time McCray has publicly discussed how depression and school-age bullying led her to consider suicide. She has previously discussed her marijuana use.
The first lady received a standing ovation from the group of 140 attendees, including mayors, other elected leaders and health professionals.
The number attending the opening session of the two-day conference was much smaller than the 224 anticipated by McCray’s staff. A spokeswoman said she anticipated more people to arrive as the conference continued.
McCray, who launched the city’s $1 billion mental-health plan ThriveNYC, also acknowledged its shortcomings.
The initiative has faced intense criticism from City Council members and mental-health advocates for its price tag, failure to track success rates and its focus on mental illnesses that experts say do not typically demand police intervention.
Critics have charged that just 12 percent of Thrive’s budget goes to helping people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.
“We still have an array, a fragmented array, of behavioral health services that lets too may people fall through the cracks and we still don’t have a unified vision for how to achieve mental health for all,” McCray admitted in her opening remarks.
Mayor de Blasio also addressed the confab and the couple was set to host a nighttime reception for attendees at Gracie Mansion.
“The more that Chirlane has surfaced this discussion and gotten people in this city talking openly about mental health and more stories have come forward, more folks who are saying out loud what they used to whisper or acknowledging what they used to keep themselves,” Hizzoner said, “and that’s healthy, that’s a beginning.”