By: Krug Stillo

New York’s deeply strained mental health system is once again under blistering scrutiny after a psychotic woman allegedly stabbed a tourist mother inside a Macy’s bathroom — an attack critics say never should have happened, as the NY Post reported.

The suspect, 43-year-old Kerri Aherne, had spent roughly a year receiving psychiatric treatment at the state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center before being released to transitional housing shortly before the bloody attack, according to the NY Post. Authorities say she traveled alone to Macy’s Herald Square, purchased a kitchen knife and allegedly attacked an unsuspecting mother as she changed her infant.

After her arrest, Aherne chillingly told authorities that “voices” in her head ordered her to kill, the NY Post reported.

To mental health insiders, the case reflects a catastrophic breakdown in how New York evaluates, treats and releases severely disturbed patients.

“Somebody determined that this woman wasn’t a danger to herself or others — and that’s the whole problem,” a doctor working within New York’s psychiatric hospital system told the NY Post.

According to the source, facilities are under constant pressure to discharge patients — not because they are well, but because keeping them hospitalized is expensive.

“The state has to pay out of pocket to house them. It costs a lot of money,” the doctor said, according to the NY Post. “If they discharge them, it looks like they’re doing a great job.”

The pressure is allegedly so intense that hospital administrators openly push doctors to move patients out the door. One psychiatrist-administrator is known among staff as “the mob boss,” the source claimed, for berating clinicians who hesitate to release unstable patients, as the NY Post reported.

Aherne had been transferred to transitional housing near the psychiatric center — a setting meant to provide continued supervision. But insiders say that supervision is often dangerously lax.

“They’re pushing patients out, but the transitional housing is barely monitored,” the hospital source told the NY Post. “It’s on the same campus. There was a broken door there for two years. Nobody fixes anything.”

The victim, a 38-year-old tourist visiting New York with her family, was slashed repeatedly in the back, shoulder and arm during the terrifying bathroom attack, the NY Post reported. Miraculously, her baby was not physically harmed.

Mayor Eric Adams told the NY Post his “thoughts” were with the victim and her family — but stressed the stabbing highlights why his administration expanded authority for involuntary psychiatric removals.

“This is exactly why we fought to expand authority to conduct involuntary removals to more clinicians,” Adams said, according to the NY Post, warning that those powers must not be rolled back by the incoming Mamdani administration.”