CBC*: Crisis response teams achieve 70% reduction in people arrested due to Mental Health

[abqtommy]

*Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/crisis-response-teams-achieve-70-reduction-in-people-taken-into-custody-under-mental-health-act-1.6296427

Original headline: 'Crisis response teams achieve 70% reduction in people taken into custody under Mental Health Act'

>Mobile units respond to more than 2,700 calls annually in Hamilton

Const. Scott Woods and mental health worker Sarah Burtenshaw check in on an elderly woman who believes neighbours are spraying a substance into her apartment. This is not the first time she's called 911.

Woods and Burtenshaw are members of Hamilton's mobile crisis rapid response team. The program pairs a police officer with a mental health worker to answer 911 calls involving people in mental health crises.

In the eight years since the program launched in Hamilton, there has been a marked reduction in taking people in mental health crisis into custody.<

There's much more text and photos at the link. I've read about persons advocating for
this type of program here in the U.S. and I think that's a very good idea.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. It works. It should be used everywhere. Thanks for posting. . . . nt

[Roy Rolling]

2. Well done, Canada

Separating criminals from those who can’t identify what a law is. There’s a huge difference.

And on a personal soapbox, the term mental illness needs to go. There is no mental organ in a human body, how can it be ill?

The stigma of brain disease needs to end, starting with a change of name.

It’s a brain disease and behavioral disorder BDBD or BD2.

Medical science can treat patients with a brain disease, a mental illness not so much.

[pazzyanne]

4. + 1

Love your post! It gets right to the heart of the problem.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. By your logic, there is no behavioral organ, so there are no behavioral disorders

You are being doctrinaire and seem to want to bend reality to your mental structure.

Mental illness can be created by stress, bad parenting, abuse, and other horrific circumstances without any underlying brain disease.

Mental illness can be successfully treated by non-invasive and non-pharmacological treatments when there is no underlying brain disease. "Can be", not "will be" or "is being" and definitely not always successfully, because mental illness is more complex than organic diseases.

Our state of mind is a meta-organ and prone to disease the same way our social fabric is a meta-body and prone to disease like the authoritarianism virus.

Non-organic mental illness is like buggy software.

[The Jungle 1]

15. Kinda like arguing over what is an casualty weapon

[Ligyron]

3. A program to actually help people, are you crazy?

Here in America, the for-profit prison business needs as many inmates as possible. Besides, who else are we gonna frame for unsolved murders?

[pazzyanne]

5. Sad, but true. nt

[Hortensis]

8. Actually, there are lots of programs like this in America,

as well as changes of law and application to existing ways.

This is STATE AND LOCAL governments, not federal.

People have to know that, know who are advocating for good in their part of America, and vote smart in order to be part of the solution.

[abqtommy]

9. Thanks. Local is good but there's lots of places here in the U.S. that just don't care. nt

[Hortensis]

11. :) Nonsense. Seriously! Each of us has state, county and municipal

authorities to care about. In every single one of them -- THOUSANDS OF THESE GOVERNMENTS -- there are people busy caring.

Here in GA, there are 159 counties and 535 incorporated municipalities, and -- to put it mildly -- they're not all the same. In FL, we live near a county line in winter, and in one direction a decent tax base and conservative progressive government created a special jurisdiction to respond to non-criminal 911 calls, while the other direction's more rural and its tax base doesn't allow that.

What's been happening in the right direction in yours? Who've been making it happen?

[The Jungle 1]

13. Bingo

[SheltieLover]

6. Good job, Canada!

[multigraincracker]

10. In the USA, jails are the

Mental institutions. Very poor mental institutions. All the funding has been stolen to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

[Hortensis]

12. Almost all are local, though, so vary tremendously.

Some places do much better, and worse, than others. How's it going where you're responsible?

[70sEraVet]

14. Crap. In Canada, even the police are nice.

Really, great job, Canada! Maybe we try doing what they're doing?
Thanks for the article.

[lark]

16. This is part of what police reform looks like.

How many people have been killed for a mental health issue that were no threat to anyone except themselves - how many? It happenned where I used to work, crazy homeless woman who didn't respond to the cops commands was killed for zero reason. So shameful and such a senseless tragedy that would have not happened if trained social workers were there instead of kill first cops.

[jaxexpat]

17. It's hard to implement something like that here in the good ol' USA because.....

such programs eliminate the punishment/retribution aspect of law enforcement. I mean, there's no perverse carnal gratification in that. It does nothing to assuage the yearning for revenge harbored within the psyche of so many who cloak their personality disorders under the conservative brand. They subsist, the progeny of American society's "birthright". Their whole life's mission is to appease their "god given" self-destructive infatuations, addicted to fake, secondhand, fantasy violence and financed by obsessive, even Pavlovian, gratification of every commercial whim. People so self-centered, devoid of honesty and alienated from thoughtful self-examination, cannot grasp, much less assess, metrics of "mental health", their own or anyone else's.