About The champion newspaper. (Decatur, GA) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (April 2, 2015)
The Champion, Thursday, April 2 - 8, 2015 LOCAL Page 3A Resources help people in crisis DeKalb Crisis Center handles thousands of cases each year. Photo by Andrew Cauthen by Andrew Cauthen andrew@ dekalb champ, com As the Georgia Bureau of Inves tigations looks into a DeKalb County Police officers recent shooting death of an unarmed, naked, bipolar man, the county already has resources to help law enforcement officers deal with people in crisis. DeKalb Crisis Center handles “a lot of different situations” includ ing “situations where the person has come voluntarily here,” said Marga ret Shelby the center director. “They are aware that they need help and they just come on their own or a family member has brought them. “We also handle situations where the person has been brought in voluntarily,” Shelby said. “In other words, there is a legal mechanism to bring them here for an evaluation. Any law enforcement officer has the capacity to do that, to pick someone up and, on the basis of their [belief] that the person looks like they might need evaluation for a mental illness, they can bring them here. Shelby said a patient may be at a local hospitals emergency room “and they are in need of further psychiatric treatment or substance abuse treatment for their crisis and then we would accept the referral from the hospital.” The center has six temporary ob servation beds for people “were not sure how long its going to take to get stabilized but ideally they might be somebody that stays with us a few hours and then we feel like they’re stable enough... [to] be discharged,” she said. There are 36 other beds for lon ger stays of up to 30 days. The aver age stay at the center is seven days. In the past year, the crisis center per formed 3,200 evaluations and admit ted 1,700 people. “That’s a lot of people,” Shelby said. Another resource in the county is the mobile crisis unit which teams a registered nurse with a police of ficer to respond crises involving mental health, substance abuse, sui cides, domestic violence and events. The unit, initiated in 1994, handles approximately 200 calls per month from E911, the DeKalb County crisis line, Georgia Crisis & Access Line and referrals from various private providers and clinics. According to Vicki Jacobs, a reg istered nurse with the mobile crisis unit, the unit runs every day from 1 to 9 p.m. covering the entire county. “The majority of our calls come through the 911 system,” Jacobs said. “We are 911 responders. If it’s dan gerous they will always give us back Y) up. Other calls come from the DeKalb County crisis line, Georgia Crisis & Access Line and referrals from private providers and clinics. The unit sees five to seven peo ple a day, Jacobs said. When the mobile crisis unit is not on an active call, the unit follows up “with anybody who has a mental health contact with a police officer,” Jacobs said, such as “somebody who’s off their medication, not sleeping, may be delusional or paranoid, fam ily has become afraid of them—may be they’re making threats, [or] carry ing a knife everywhere they go. “It’s probably not going to be enough to get them a mental health appointment,” said Jacobs, who has worked with the unit for 20 years. “So we go out and talk to them and try to get them to go with us for some mental health intervention.” Without the center, “probably all of the hospital emergency rooms in DeKalb County would be much full er than they are,” Shelby said. “They are already full but if there were no crisis center then there would be lots and lots of folks that [go there]. Were there no crisis center, folks would end up going somewhere and most often.. .they generally will go to a hospital.” Police officers would be im pacted because “they bring a lot of folks here,” Shelby said. “One of the important factors is.. .when they bring someone here, [we] can handle that in a fairly expedited manner. We don’t ask them to stay a long time. That’s a benefit to the police. ”If we were not doing this cen ter you would have that many more hours of police time that would go into taking people to other emer gency rooms,” Shelby said. ’’The other resource that would feel the pinch,” Shelby said, “would be the state hospital. If you don’t have a means to pay for your care... that’s where you would end up.” Without the crisis center and mobile crisis unit, most of the pa tients seen by the center would go to jail, Jacobs said. “Part of what we try to do is keep mentally ill people from going to jail...on minor offenses,” Jacobs said. “Jail is very limited in what [it provides],” Shelby said. “We see a lot of folks who have been to jail and who were taking medication and for a variety of reasons that doesn’t get followed through very well. Jails are limited in their budgets with what they can afford to do. That can be a real problem. Plus it’s a problem for the jail to deal with [mental pa tients], They don’t fit in well with the normal population.” CHAHPIONNEWSPAPER CHAMPIONNEUS fCHAMPIONNEMSPAPER ©CHAMPNEWSPAPER DN'T RECEIVE OUR LATEST ISSUE? mm ■ iwiEiMMEn .c
