The University of California–Irvine partnered with Be Well OC to launch a new mobile crisis response team on campus starting in the Fall semester.
The team, composed of two trained mental health crisis counselors, will respond to calls for service from both 911 and the UCI nonemergency dispatch with a goal to “offer direct mental health assistance and significantly reduce the need for police and emergency medical services in such scenarios.” UCI Police Chief Liz Griffin lauded the launch saying that it reaffirms the university’s “commitment to the well-being and mental health of its students, faculty and staff.”
UC-Irvine is just the latest of a growing number of universities, disproportionately located in California, that have begun to dispatch mental health experts to some calls for service on campus. Here are three examples:
- California State University–Fullerton. For the Orange County Register, Lou Ponsi reports on the newly announced mobile crisis response team that “consists of unarmed, unsworn safety specialists partnering with licensed mental health professionals to respond to nonviolent crisis calls.” CSU-Fullerton Police Chief Anthony Frisbee told the newspaper that the model for the campus mobile crisis response team, which is a partnership between the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services Department and the campus police department, not only gets people in distress the help that they need, but also “frees up police officers to focus on prevention, intervention and responding to calls involving violence or criminal activity.”
- University of California–Berkeley. For The Daily Californian, UC-Berkeley’s student newspaper, Lia Klebanov reports on the new “Campus Mobile Crisis Response” team, composed of EMTs and clinicians, which responds to mental health-related calls for service from university students, faculty, and staff. The team will also “reduce the number of calls that a uniformed officer needs to respond to,” Russ Ballati, senior project manager in the university vice chancellor’s office, told the newspaper. “It’s a huge benefit to everybody because UCPD doesn’t have the staff to be able to respond to these types of calls, nor do they have the experience to respond.”
- University of Utah. For the campus news service, Benjamin Gleisser covers the university’s “Mental Health First Responders” team—composed of “a program manager, two licensed social workers, and two master’s candidates in social work who serve as interns”—which “supports students living in [university] residence halls experiencing a mental health crisis” seven days a week from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. The key to the program, a partnership between Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the University Counseling Center, is that it centers “around mental health intervention, rather than a direct call for police intervention, which might increase any anguish the distressed student already feels,” Gleisser writes.