They’ve spent years on the streets. Can anyone coax them inside?

NEW YORK — Chris Payton and Sonia Daley emerged from the subway into the brilliant sunshine to meet a client nesting on a pile of blankets near the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan.

It had taken their team almost five months just to track down the 43-year-old homeless woman, chasing leads from police and other homeless people. On this afternoon last August, they were trying to help her find the holy grail: an apartment where someone with a severe mental illness could build a stable life.

The woman, M, flashed them a big smile. In her black baseball cap, long blond wig, oversize sunglasses and about 20 bracelets, she looked like a misplaced movie star.

M, who has schizoaffective disorder, immediately began chattering. She said she was doing great, thanks to Payton: “He gave me a million-dollar bill in cash, so I’m living off that.” Her boyfriend sat beside her, rocking and weaving, one gloved hand in constant motion as if conducting an invisible orchestra.

Her visitors were from a street team of clinicians, called an Intensive Mobile Treatment team, who deliver a vast array of services — medical, social, material, logistical, spiritual — to some of the city’s most vulnerable and volatile residents. They asked that M be identified only by her initial.

Intensive mobile treatment is a mostly unheralded but crucial component of Mayor Eric Adams’ attempts to tackle the overlapping crises of mental illness and homelessness. It is also a gentler, more holistic complement to blunter tactics that have grabbed more attention, like sending police and sanitation workers to tear down encampments and taking people to hospitals against their will.

There are 31 such teams, run by nonprofits under contract with the city, ministering to more than 800 people, with a waitlist of 250 more. In March, Adams said the city would add five more teams, to serve an additional 135 people. The teams’ clients have struggled with homelessness and mental illness or substance abuse and often have criminal or violent histories. They live their lives both at the city’s very margins and at the chaotic intersections of dysfunctional bureaucracies.

There are other street programs that serve precarious New Yorkers; IMT is for the toughest cases.

Over the course of seven months, two teams that share a Brooklyn office let a reporter and photographer shadow them. The teams’ workers meet clients where they are, at shelters and hospitals, train stations and park benches. They go along to court dates and housing interviews and inject them with antipsychotic drugs on street corners.

They buy them chopped-cheese sandwiches, flip phones and warm socks — anything to keep clients engaged. Their job, said Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, is to be the glue that holds together the pieces of a fractured life.

“What this really comes down to is accompaniment,” Vasan said. “Am I able to walk beside you in your journey?” IMT teams, he said, “follow the ethos of ‘whatever it takes.’ There is no problem that isn’t their problem.”

The city has found that the teams help people find stability, but the road there is steep and littered with obstacles. Hospitals discharge psychotic clients without notice. Shelters let benefit applications expire. Paperwork disappears.

That August afternoon by the ferry, M’s consciousness streamed out in a childlike voice. “When I wake up, I’m not hungry; when I wake up, I’m not excited or sad,” she told Payton and Daley. “The way I sleep is, I sleep on my back with my hand or arm around my head. That’s important. My relaxation and that will help you determine with what kind of housing you give me.”

Sometimes M seemed to say the opposite of what might be true. “I don’t have a mental history of schizophrenic bipolar because my parents, they did great, and I didn’t grow up in an abusive household,” she said. “Nobody didn’t punch nobody when the money ran out.”

No matter how far into fantasy M wandered, Daley — a type of counselor called a peer specialist — and her boss, Payton, 50, the team’s program director, guided her back toward the practical.

To qualify for housing, they explained, she needed to go with them to a Social Security office. They could also help her get disability benefits. M enthusiastically agreed.

“I’m glad you’re willing to work with us,” Payton said.

“My job position is, I’m a prim executive director,” M said. “I don’t mind sleeping on the blanket, but every day I want to access my wealth and go to work.”

“You have great work experience,” Payton said, adding, “We’ll try to help you make your goals.”

M flashed into coherence.

“My goal is just to think clearly and not be schizophrenic and not be on drugs so that you can talk to me and get your point across and you can understand my disposition and what I’m trying to say,” she said.

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