More than 200 million calls are made to 911 in the US every year.

And the majority of those calls involve someone who is suffering with mental health problems. In San Francisco for example, mental health problems rather than crime, account for about 80 percent of all calls received by police dispatch. For many areas not only in the US, the police have become the default responders in this scenario and they often are the first ones to show up on the scene.

It's been a problem that's been going on for so long that now the criminal justice system has morphed into the mental health system and have been referred to as the new asylum because of the vast number of individuals who need help who have gotten caught up in it. And the system isn't equipped for that responsibility.

Some researchers have suggested that perhaps 25 percent of all inmates have some serious mental illness.

Even worse, they are often subjected to isolation; between 33-50 percent of prisoners in isolation suffer from a serious mental illness.

Rather than focusing on any non-violent, peaceful resolution, when the police respond to the crisis their actions often worsen the matter.

They end-up escalating the situation to the point of someone being tasered or shot.

And for officers themselves who've suffered from depression, suicidal thoughts, or anxiety etc, because of their stressful work environments, they've basically been told by their superiors to suck it up. This sort of behavior is what has prompted some officers to even take their lives, prompting some police departments to take another look at their approach.

Things have gotten so bad between the police and the mental health community that now a great number of police departments offer crisis intervention training. Some have even considered alternative approaches to dealing with those 911 calls altogether, rather than having police sent as the first responders to those types of situations.

In Stockholm, Sweden, authorities there are trying a different approach.

They've deployed the world's first mental health ambulance, otherwise known as PAM the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team. It's the first of its kind as a solution to respond to the mental health crises in Stockholm.

The service launched back in 2015 and it's already proven to be a success.

They've already used the service to respond to over 1,000 individuals that needed help, they get about 130+ calls every month. And those behind the project say they've only seen about 96 repeat individuals and one fourth ended up being referred to long-term inpatient care.

The team includes mental health nurses and one paramedic, with a mission to provide quality care to DE-escalate any situation they're called to, trying to calm the person down. And many of those calls allegedly relate to a risk of suicide.

Here in the US, they're also trying out different solutions, one of them being a mobile app that's known as Concrn.

The app is an alternative to 911, for non-emergency situations, that can help people during mental health crises. The app connects those who need help with compassionate first responders and they've been active helping those in the San Francisco area.

Those on the response team are required to go through some training beforehand, about 20 hours of it, and they come from a variety of different backgrounds including emergency medical training, social work, and more. They help to connect those who need it with helpful services that might be able to assist them to get information about what they need, whether that be shelter, a job, someone to talk to etc.

Since many officers aren't trained or ready to deal with people who are suffering with a mental illness, it's time that we thought of other solutions to this problem. Because continuing to send the police as the default responders, when they aren't properly trained or capable or remaining calm, is only going to continue putting people in danger. And carting people off to jail and trying to ignore the problem by locking them up isn't helping to solve it either. Hopefully, more emergency responders will start to move in a new direction.

The mental health crisis shouldn't be placed entirely on the shoulders of police officers around the nation and elsewhere to solve.

Pics:
Pixabay
Pixabay
pixabay

Sources:
https://www.nena.org/?page=911Statistics
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11134908/criminal-justice-mental-health
https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/xwvkda/why-the-mentally-ill-keep-getting-shot-by-cops
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shootings-in-2015-approaching-400-nationwide/2015/05/30/d322256a-058e-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/evidence-and-research/learn-more-about/3695
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-zoukis/mental-illness-is-rampant_b_14188302.html
http://time.com/4144276/mentally-ill-police-killings-study/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/half-people-killed-police-suffer-mental-disability-report-n538371
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/05/30/how-victoria-police-has-dealt-with-mental-health-and-suicide_a_21386238/
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/06/health/police-mental-health-training/index.html
http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-mental-health-crisis-training-police.html
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/worlds-first-mental-health-ambulance-helping-hundreds-people-sweden/
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/5gqemz/stockholm-mental-health-ambulance-263
https://www.ems1.com/international/articles/371683048-Sweden-premieres-worlds-first-mental-health-ambulance/
https://apolitical.co/solution_article/worlds-first-mental-health-ambulance-arrives-sweden/
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/29/concrn-is-a-911-alternative-that-helps-people-during-mental-health-crises/