Social workers training officers to handle mental health situations
By James Felton and Stephen Borowy
Click here for updates on this story
GENESEE COUNTY, Michigan (WNEM) — A training program with the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office with social workers is teaching deputies about how to handle a wide variety of situations that can be affected by mental health diseases and disorders.
Officers learn about these situations in a crisis intervention team.
“We have 68 crisis intervention team trained law enforcement officers right now,” said Kailey Baker, a behavioral health urgent care crisis intervention team supervisor for Genesee Health System.
Baker said the training she offers is important for police officers that respond to a wide variety of situations.
“Right now, we’ve noticed that really in law enforcement, a mental health call is typically considered like suicidal or homicidal,” Baker said. “But we open it up to everything, to teaching about Alzheimer’s, dementia, autism, anything like that, for helping children compared to adults and how we talk to them differently just to be successful on calls.”
Meanwhile, Lisa Bruder, manager of crisis services at Genesee Health System, said the training program is a hit with officers.
“We’ve had officers tell us throughout the entire last year of this program that this is something they’ve never really known about before,” Bruder said. “And so having them connected to resources and having alternatives to jail or going the ER, they have other places to take people in need.”
As for Baker, she said plans to develop a co-response team with the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office are in the works.
“We have contracts with a deputy and a sergeant and what they do is they go out on mental health related calls with a mental health professional,” Baker said.
Baker said the training program, which is just more than one year old, has been a success. She’ll look for more ways to make it even better.
“It’s just been a really great program so far,” Baker said. “We have so many more ideas to evolve and get bigger. We just can’t wait to see where that goes.”
Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
