In Chicago and the region, new 911 response alternatives find early success, but also limits in urgent mental health treatment
CHICAGO — A woman called 911, worried her friend might commit suicide after seeing a concerning photo on social media and thinking she may have slit her wrist.
When a mental health response team arrived at the friend’s home on Chicago’s South Side last month as part of a new city effort, the team’s members were able to get the woman to talk to the team. The woman told them her daughter had died and her partner had left her.
“She didn’t want to die, but she had been trying to get help for so long, and different places that she called had given her the runaround,” said Gabrielle Mitchell, a mental health clinician with the response team, which now goes out on some Chicago 911 calls. “She really just wanted somebody to come and talk to her.”
In the weeks after the mental health team met the woman, she has set up a job interview and Mitchell has talked to her about going to counseling once she is employed.
The city’s Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement — or CARE — pilot program launched last fall, and some city officials and team members responding to calls say they’ve been able to help many people they’ve come in contact with. But the program has been limited in many ways, from the amount of days and hours the teams are out, to a lack of mental health providers the teams are able to work with to get people the help they need, team members said.
And community organizers and aldermen who have pushed for a nonpolice mental health response model over the last few years say the way the program has been designed is not what they had in mind.
Police have
