Search is on to hire for Benton mental health crisis response team

Benton County agreed Tuesday, April 18 to permanently fund eight new positions while searching for counselors who will serve as the fast-moving, in-person response team to mental health crises.

The challenge will be filling the positions by the start of the state fiscal biennium in July.

Elected leaders signed off on creating positions needed to staff two-person teams who will try to intervene between those most likely to be involuntarily hospitalized, arrested or removed from their family and police officers, who most frequently respond to behavioral health emergencies.

“We feel more than confident about this being a cost-neutral point for the county,” county Mental Health Director Damien Sands said.

Permanent funding will come through Oregon Health Authority and a per-teammate, per-month rate from InterCommunity Health Network, the regional Medicaid service coordinator.

Congress in 2020 replaced the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline with a nationwide, all-hours crisis hotline available by dialing 988.

The hotline serves as a point of contact for suicidal and distraught callers and as a dispatcher in an attempt to get more people experiencing mental health crises on the phone or in a chat with a trained counselor.

Federal regulators took 988 live in 2022.

The country was responding in part to widespread protest that year over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.

That was around the time municipalities began looking to Oregon for a possible mobile crisis response model in a Eugene-based nonprofit, CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets.

Responders with mobile crisis teams are trained to interact with people who are disoriented or can’t care for themselves or function while affected by addiction or severe mental illness.

Those are calls where someone is experiencing an emergency but isn’t a danger to others or requires medical aid.

In many communities, police respond to behavioral health crises. As many as one in four people killed by police are experiencing severe mental illness, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center in a 2015 report.

While Congress directed the Department of Justice to find how often police kill people with mental illness, exact national numbers aren’t available because just two in five law enforcement agencies volunteered their crime statistics.

Oregon law enforcement agencies participated at a higher rate — 208 out of 235 in 2021, or 88.5%.

The state Legislature made a $15 million appropriation in 2021 to fund two call centers, in Portland and Salem, and build up local governments’ teams providing mobile crisis services.

Oregon mandated that each community be able to respond to 988 calls. A state law requires all formally recognized community mental health programs to staff two-person teams available to respond to calls around the clock.

In communities like Albany and Corvallis, those teams must be available to respond to a crisis within an hour.

A Linn County employee told Mid-Valley Media in 2022 that staffing would be key to implementing the crisis line and mobile response teams.

“Workforce is obviously a question mark right now, and we do need a workforce to support this,” said Tanya Thompson, a mental health program manager.

A bill working its way through the state House would create a funding baseline for mobile crisis teams in each of Oregon’s 36 counties and pull multiple funding streams into a single source of revenue called the 988 Trust Fund.