TOWNS

Your town has one major mental health provider who has been providing outpatient and residential service for years. The problem is that your town does not have a crisis unit. You work for the local suicide hotline, which handles thousands of calls a year, of which a few hundred are suicide threats. Currently, the protocol is to call the police who then transport the client two towns away to the nearest crisis center. Too often, this creates problems for the clients and their families because of the distance.

Your supervisor has asked you to serve on a task force to investigate the feasibility of creating a partnership with area agencies to try to solve the problem of what to do with clients experiencing a mental crisis.

What steps should you and the members of the task force take to solve this problem?

What are some creative solutions that would include the town’s substance abuse agency, homeless shelter, domestic violence shelter, and police?