Berkeley’s mobile crisis team, Specialty Care, has finally revealed an expected start date and phone number.
SCUs can begin accepting calls on Sept. 5, the day after Labor Day, according to Samantha Russell, director of crisis services at Bonita House, a nonprofit mental health care organization that runs a $4.5 million two-year pilot program. It should be.
Bonita House has hired five SCU team members and is still recruiting, Russell said during a town hall-style Zoom meeting Wednesday. When fully staffed, the SCU would rotate his three-person team of behavioral health technicians, peer support specialists, and paramedics to assist with crisis calls that were previously delivered to the city police. He works around the clock to respond to
Initially, SCU will only have limited daytime phone support, but as more staff and vehicles become available, Russell said the company aims to be available 24 hours a day, every day.
Russell said the city has purchased a van to be used by the SCU team, but it is not yet ready for deployment. For the first few weeks or months of SCU activity, we will use a rented van. Rental vans do not have wheelchair ramps, but permanent vans have wheelchair ramps.
A bottleneck for many SCU supporters has been receiving mental health services and drug crisis calls from police station command centers. Russell said Wednesday that SCU has a dedicated 10-digit phone number of 510-948-0075, but no one will be able to take the call until Sept. 5.
“We check voicemail every morning, but we don’t answer,” Russell said. “So right now, if there’s a psychiatric emergency, it’s still 911.”
Russell said that when he was in SCU, he or someone he knew was experiencing “symptoms of a mental health or behavioral crisis” such as feeling anxious, helpless, socially withdrawn, restless or struggling. If you’re experiencing it,” he said, you should call. Substance use or abuse. The SCU can also handle health checks and reports of people contemplating harming themselves or others.
Of the more than 60,000 service requests the Berkeley Police Department handles each year, welfare checks alone account for 2,500 to 3,000, according to data from the department’s Transparency Hub.
But when it comes to conventional emergency care, Russell said SCUs can only provide “very basic care.” “Some calls may still require a 911 response if there is a serious medical emergency or if something else is going on.”
The idea for the unit first surfaced in June 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The council’s bill said its aim was to move “non-criminal” calls from the city police to a “network of crisis responders.”
