CLEVELAND — Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb made mental health a priority last month in his state of the city address and announced he wants to get help to those who need it during a crisis.

What You Need To Know

  • The idea of a Care Response Team was presented to ADAMHS Board of Cuyahoga County 

  • Mental health professionals would respond to a crisis call instead of law enforcement 

  • Other cities around Ohio have implemented this and have seen success 

“When members of my family were suffering from mental health illness, their first call was to to 911, and unfortunately, sometimes, that doesn’t need to be the first call. And we’ve seen as well that public health informed response to safety, can work,” he said in his April 19 address. 

The Bibb administration and other mental health advocates have begun pushing to expand a program that they began last year, which is a police officer and a mental health professional going to mental health crisis calls together, but people want to take it a step further.

Dr. Mark Hurst is behavioral health consultant for Hurst Health Consulting and presented the “Care Response Team” to the ADAMHS Board of Cuyahoga County.

“What we’re talking about here is that would expand our crisis continuum of care would be that sometimes people don’t need to have an officer there. It doesn’t have to involve law enforcement at all,” he said.

Scott Osiecki, the CEO of the ADAMHS Board, said mental health professionals would first gauge the needs of a caller to be able to respond most effectively.

“That the first responders to a behavioral health crisis would be individuals who have behavioral health expertise. Who can appropriately assess the situation and help resolve the situation and avoid unnecessary hospitalization, incarceration or police involvement,” he said.

Hurst explained that this proposal followed in the footsteps of what other cities across Ohio are already doing. 

“There are literally 20 or 30 other cities that are either have implemented this or in the process of implementing it around the country, including Cincinnati and Columbus and Dayton,” he said.

The Crisis Call Center in Dayton, for example, received 12,000 phone calls in 2022 and its Mobile Crisis Reponse Team was dispatched 600 times, according to Tina Rezash, director of Strategic Initiatives and Communications at the Montgomery County ADAMH.

The Cuyahoga County ADAMHS Board will consider the information that was presented at the meeting and work toward creating the “Care Response Team.”