New State Funding Improves County Mental Health Services

By Elaine Korry

The Joslyn Center in Burbank is a place where older adults come for low-cost healthy meals and activities ranging from fitness and computer classes to music lessons.

But several times lately, the normally placid environment of the center has been disrupted. One client who uses the services was showing signs of mental illness. Renee Crawford coordinates social services at the Center.

“She gets very loud, very aggressive and very anxious," Crawford said, in reference to the troubled client. "And then we have to go in and tell her, 'Calm down, relax, you can’t be this loud,' Then she gets very upset and very irate.”

The woman seemed to be suffering from paranoid delusions, and Crawford says the workers here aren’t trained to help her.

"Staff gets very uncomfortable with it. We have called the police. We have asked her to leave the building.”

Until recently, there were few places for Crawford to go for help. But legislation passed last year in Sacramento provides more than $140 million in grant funds for, among other things, mobile crisis support teams.

Because Crawford was worried her client might become violent, she turned to a service of the Burbank Police Department, called a Mental Health Evaluation Team. The team pairs a clinical psychologist and a patrol officer, who respond together to mental health crises. Psychologist Jennifer Hunt says the goal is to assess people and, if appropriate, connect them with mental health services. The team seeks to head off a confrontation that could land a person, like Crawford's client, either in the hospital or jail.

“We would want to make sure not only that we are addressing the needs that she continues to present," says Hunt, "but also to make sure that everybody’s safe.”

Back in the patrol car, Kristiana Sanchez, the police officer who works with Hunt, says units like this one free up other patrols to focus on their primary mission -- fighting crime. Before crisis teams were in use, she says police officers wasted valuable time in waiting rooms.

“It took many officers out of the field to deal with transporting someone who was in a mental health crisis to the hospital and then sitting there for multiple hours," Sanchez says. "And that took two officers for just one person.”

Now, says Sanchez, specially-trained officers like her are able to recognize the symptoms of mental disorders.

Linda Boyd, who started the emergency outreach bureau for Los Angeles County, says responding to mental illness requires very different skills from disarming criminals.

“We treat people with respect," Boyd says. "We don’t rush in. … We give the person time to calm down. With folks who have a mental illness, you really have to slow down.”

Mobile crisis teams are expensive, and were only available in parts of the Los Angeles County until last year when lawmakers approved the Investment in Mental Health Wellness Act. It restored badly needed funding for psychiatric services. Now, with the new grant money, Los Angeles has more than a dozen new mobile crisis teams, and is doubling the number of its urgent care units -- places where people in a psychiatric emergency can go for help, instead of the hospital or jail.