Mobile Team Reaches Out to Victims of Mental Health Crises

The call came in to the Ventura Police Department from a Los Angeles man who believed that his sister in Ventura was suicidal and wanted officers to check on her.

Police found the middle-aged woman living in a barren apartment with no food. She refused to talk to police, who concluded that she was mentally unstable and needed professional help.

That is when police called Mary Lopez, one of 20 mental health specialists on Ventura County’s mobile psychiatric crisis team.

Lopez and another crisis team member arrived minutes later and tried to calm the woman. But the agitated woman spat and yelled at the two mental health officials.

“God and I will get you, you fascist pigs,” she shouted at Lopez.

Failing to calm her, Lopez asked police to subdue the woman and committed her to a mental health facility.

The episode was the most dramatic incident during the team’s first full week back in action after an eight-year hiatus.

The team, which was eliminated because of budget cuts prompted by Proposition 13, includes clinical social workers, mental health nurses and trained psychiatric technicians.

Like a paramedic team, the psychiatric crisis team responds to calls from private citizens and police. The key difference is that this group is trained to intervene in mental health crises, such as suicide attempts or disturbances involving the mentally ill.

Team members can declare a patient a threat to himself or others and commit him to a psychiatric hospital for up to 72 hours.

The group provides mobile services between 7 a.m. and midnight but is expecting by next month to expand the service to 24 hours a day.

During the first week, one team member responding to a call encountered a large snake slithering across a living room table. Another calmed a hysterical man in the emergency room. A psychiatric technician comforted a despondent 14-year-old girl who had overdosed on pain killers after her brother was killed by a drunk driver.

For the past eight years, county-employed psychiatric specialists have treated patients at the county’s mental health center near the Ventura County Medical Center. However, most patients were taken to the facility by police or relatives.

County officials said the mobile psychiatric team was revived this year partly at the behest of law enforcement officials who are given only minimal training in dealing with suicide attempts and disturbances involving the mentally ill.

The team’s mobile status also gives it the ability to transport the mentally ill to health-care facilities, freeing up police to respond to other calls.

“It is time-consuming both to transport a person and to do an evaluation,” said Lt. Paul Buckley, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “And if the person didn’t have insurance, our only recourse was to transport to the county mental health offices.”

Buckley said it can take law enforcement officials between two and three hours to evaluate a mentally ill person and drive him to the proper health-care facility.

“I have been strongly in favor of that kind of unit for almost 20 years,” said Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens.

The county will pay half of the $1-million annual cost for the program’s 20 staff members. The balance will be shared by the five private hospitals in the county with psychiatric units.

In addition, county residents who are treated and transported by members of the psychiatric team are assessed a fee based on a sliding scale.

Two private hospitals in the county have mobile psychiatric evaluation teams. However, those teams are not trained in crisis intervention, according to county officials.

While the crisis team has responded to about 10 calls a day, team member Derrick McElliott said “nothing has yet been a war story.”

So far, McElliott said he has been called to make psychological evaluations on two people who had attempted suicide.

He expects the team will get many more calls once word spreads about the services. “People need to find that we are in business,” he said.

Sandy Spigleman, a psychiatric technician, said the case of the girl who overdosed on pain killers is the type the team expects to encounter regularly.

“There will be a lot of family problems we will deal with,” she said.

Ferris Grubb, another team member, said the most difficult aspect of his job so far has been the unpredictable pace of the telephone calls coming into the center.

“It’s either really busy or you are not busy at all,” he said. “You just can’t schedule a crisis.”