Collaboration between police and community mental health agencies can benefit people in crisis as well as officers themselves. This was a key theme in a presentation from CMHA Ontario CEO Camille Quenneville at a recent two-day conference hosted by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
Quenneville stressed that police services across Ontario are already collaborating with community mental health organizations to improve outcomes for individuals living with a mental illness who find themselves in crisis.
Quenneville pointed to Hamilton, where police and mental health professionals are dispatched as first responders. Hamilton’s Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team has proven its interventions have a far better outcome then a police-only response.
In London, police routinely use a mental health and addictions crisis centre operated in partnership with CMHA Middlesex. Police use this community resource rather than taking people in crisis to a local hospital emergency department. The result: shorter wait times for police when they accompany the individual, and more appropriate services for the person in crisis.
Quenneville was invited to speak at The Push for Change: A two-day mental health symposium. The event is a follow up to the OPP’s mental health strategy, Our People, Our Communities, which was released in December 2015.
She used the opportunity to applaud the OPP on its mental health strategy, encouraged attendees to speak openly about operational stress injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, and to seek appropriate help.