>>L.A. County gave up on a mental health program and is handing back millions in grants
July 31, 2023>>Without enough psychiatrists, pediatricians have become front-line mental health workers
July 31, 2023(Jess Hutchison/Los Angeles Times)
While campaigning for mayor in mid-August, Karen Bass spoke about a brand-new three-digit mental health crisis hotline — 988 — and its promise to save lives of people suffering from mental illness by avoiding deadly confrontations with police.
As a member of Congress, she had examined more than 100 lethal police encounters throughout the country and found that at least 40% involved a mental health crisis, she said. The figure dwarfs the often-cited national statistic that a quarter of all people who die at the hands of law enforcement have serious psychiatric problems.
In Los Angeles, police reported a similar figure in 2022: 39% of the people their officers shot were in the midst of a mental health crisis.
Now, that would change, Bass said at the news conference highlighting the launch of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
“I’m so proud to know that L.A. is going to be on the forefront of having a solution,” she declared.
But the rollout of 988 and related psychiatric emergency services has so far failed to live up to that promise, a Times investigation has found.
On July 15, 2022, one day before the 988 hotline went live, the L.A. County Department of Mental Health proclaimed the county was ready for a “seamless” rollout of the service that would include “trained psychiatric mobile crisis response teams who can be connected to through the 988 line when necessary.”
The county would hire privately contracted teams so crisis therapists could respond 24/7, up from 18 hours a day, the county statement said.
More than eight months later, none of that has come to pass: Hotline workers cannot directly dispatch mental health teams, and callers often wait hours for an emergency response.
Although the county mental health department has a fleet of mobile teams dedicated to responding to people in psychological distress, in more than 9 of 10 cases, those unarmed mental health workers take more than an hour to respond to callers in need of emergency services, a Times analysis of county data found.
About half of the time, teams take more than four hours; sometimes callers wait days.
Meanwhile, the phone and computer systems that city and county agencies use to help residents in crisis remain disconnected from 988.
Crisis counselors who answer the 988 hotline — via the nonprofit Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, based in West L.A. — cannot dispatch emergency teams. Instead, they must transfer a person in crisis to a separate county hotline, which can opt to send mental health workers — bouncing the caller around the system.
Sam Blake, who runs a home for people with severe mental illness in Sylmar, has pretty much given up requesting a mobile crisis team when a client becomes unstable or aggressive, which can happen weekly for residents with hard-to-treat disorders. He said teams usually take four to six hours to show up. The last time, they didn’t come at all.
“They’re too slow, and they’re not sufficient,” Blake said of the teams. “Our first choice now is either call the police or at least get the client to stop being destructive.”
A new way to show up: Sending therapists instead of cops
A person who breaks their leg, faces a robber at gunpoint or flees a house in flames can count on paramedics, police or fire personnel to rush to their aid. There is no equivalent in much of the U.S. to assist an individual battling psychological demons.
“That is what we are trying to change here in L.A. County,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said in a statement.
In Los Angeles, policymakers and law enforcement officials have long known that what’s in place wasn’t working. They began efforts to change the system years before the national 988 number came along.
Both the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department pair mental health clinicians with specially trained officers in an effort to deescalate crises without using force. The law enforcement agencies began rolling out those specialized teams in the early 1990s. The county mental health department also began building its civilian mobile response more than two decades ago.
Calls to scale up these programs became more urgent in recent years, prompted by disturbingly frequent incidents of police killing people — particularly Black men — who were in the midst of mental health crises.
Read full article here:
L.A. County gave up on a mental health program — and is handing back millions in grants (yahoo.com)
