BLOG: Your Mental Health is Our Top Priority

Asking for help is often a difficult thing to do, particularly when it involves a situation or problem that is surrounded by so much stigma, like mental health. Thanks to organizations like Mental Health America – who advocated for May to be Mental Health Awareness Month more than 70 years ago – it is becoming easier to openly discuss and find resources that help us deal with pain we often condition ourselves to ignore. With a $1.6 million investment in our emergency crisis response programs, Baltimore County is doubling down on its commitment to making our resources more accessible.

Last month, the County Executive announced the expansion the Baltimore County Police Department’s (BCPD) Mobile Crisis Teams (MCT) and the creation of a 9-1-1 Call Center Clinician Program. An early adapter of the co-responder model for mental health crises, MCT is comprised of a specially-trained police officer and a licensed mental health clinician who together respond to behavioral health related calls-for-service, such as family conflicts, juvenile complaints, and substance abuse. These teams are also often on site to provide counseling to witnesses or observers who were near tragedy, like a car cash or a fire. Since its creation in 2001, MCT has grown from a pilot program to a successful County-wide, 24-hour service. For example, of the 2,711 calls MCT responded to in 2020, 91 percent of those calls were referred to a behavioral health resource that best fit that individual need, diverting that crisis from unnecessarily overwhelming our health and legal systems.

“This program is all about connecting people in crisis to the best and most appropriate service for what their needs are. Behavioral health is a complex area of service or study. There is no one size fits all solution,” said Major Joseph Cognar, Incident Management and Special Projects Commander with the BCPD.

The forthcoming call center clinician program will build on this success by collaborating with the Baltimore County Department of Health and Human Services to start the intervention process even earlier. Mental health clinicians will now be stationed in the call center to help screen and divert calls to the appropriate behavioral health resource if the callers do not have immediate health or safety concerns.

“When I was an officer on patrol we didn’t have clinicians. We just had to do the best we could and that was usually just to take people to the hospital, which we now know is not the best solution. The best solution now is to have a clinician right there on the scene. It is amazing,” said Captain Matthew Weatherly, Commander of the Wellness Section of the BCPD.

Together these programs are allowing the County to better meet the existing need for services and the increase in need experts predict will come as a result of the pandemic. With the current team, MCT is reaching about 44 percent of the calls-for-services initiated through the 911 call center and hotline. These new investments will increase the team by 50 percent, making it possible for more residents to get the help they need.

“We as a society need to do a better job of making it easier for people to reach out. I think these programs do that because they give additional confidence to people that they are getting responsive and appropriate resources. The only way we are going to get people to reach out is to make it easy and comfortable for them to do so,” said Major Cognar.

If you or someone you know are experiencing any type of mental health crisis, call the hotline at 410-931-2214. Help will be on the way