As part of a broader nationwide effort to improve policing methods, Salina-area law enforcement will undergo a program that helps equip officers to handle calls involving mental health disorders and illnesses.

There are a variety of reasons why law enforcement might interact with someone experiencing a mental health crisis, but being prepared for those situations is part of the job many don’t initially anticipate. As mental health issues continue to be on the rise, localities like Salina are working in partnership with mental health experts to change how these interactions play out.

Ericka Lysell, a mental health liaison at Salina Public Schools and longtime mental health social worker, said partnerships between law enforcement and mental health professionals is paving the way for better outcomes.

“People don’t go into law enforcement and say ‘I want to work in mental health,’” Lysell said. “But now you have to have a foundation or some knowledge for first-response jobs.”

Salina police officers and their K-9 unit set up a booth at the Saline County National Night Out event Aug. 1. Officers will participate in a training for interacting with people having a mental health crisis later this month.

More service calls in Salina now involve mental health issues

Lysell worked with officer Chris Venables at the Salina Police Department to plan a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training this month. From Aug. 14-18, law enforcement officers from Salina Police, the Saline County Sheriff’s Office, Community Corrections workers, dispatchers and others will join forces for a 40-hour curriculum centered around interactions with people experiencing mental health issues.

With approximately one-third of service calls in Salina now involving a mental health component, Venables said the training is essential for officers to do their jobs well.

“Officers learn to better help or assist people in mental health crisis and get a better understanding of mental health disabilities,” Venables said. “A lot of things have to do with mental health now and sometimes substance abuse and mental health hand-in-hand.”

CIT training is a nationwide program that got its start in 1988. In the 35 years since its inception, it has grown to create a curriculum with key focus points of de-escalation, base knowledge of disorders and connecting individuals with resources.

Story continues

Lysell said the training covers different diagnoses like mood disorders and psychotic disorders, as well as homelessness, veterans and other populations that are at-risk.

Trooper Ben Gardner with the Kansas Highway Patrol talks to Yui Iwatomo, 6, and Lacie Bohn, 6, at the National Night Out event Aug. 1. Salina law enforcement officers are having Crisis Intervention Team training this month.

Program known nationwide for de-escalation practices

As part of the CIT training, role players act out scenarios from a script playing an individual with varying levels of mental health disorders and illnesses. Officers will interact with them and get feedback from mental health workers.

There are classroom-like settings as well, where officers will learn about different disorders and illnesses and the signs they might be dealing with an individual experiencing them.

“It’s about working as a team between the clinician and law enforcement to get the right things to say, know how to act, things to look for so we can help them through that crisis and get them the help that they need,” Venables said.

Venables and Lysell serve on the state Crisis Intervention Team Council, helping other localities get in on the training it provides. A while back, Venables attended a larger-scale CIT training in Salt Lake City to get a hand on what all goes into these programs.

CIT has been in Salina since at least 2016 but took a break during the pandemic. This year’s training is the first one in Salina since 2019. In coming years Salina Police hopes to expand its reach by inviting law enforcement from surrounding areas in central Kansa to take part.

Venables said he is grateful for partnerships like these and the ability to get help from experts when extreme or unordinary circumstances arise.

“It’s really nice to have officers trained in (crisis intervention) because mental health is an issue that’s not going away,” Lysell said.

Commissioner Joe Hay (left) talks with Saline County Sheriff Deputy Rick Heinrich at National Night Out. Amid a broad effort to improve policing methods, Salina-area law enforcement will learn how to interact with people experiencing mental health crisis.

To ‘serve and protect’ looks different today

Most people understand the law enforcement side of policing, Venables said, but not everyone grasps the community caretaking aspect of their jobs, like helping someone whose car broke down on the side of the road.

“We get all sorts of calls to do things that people wouldn’t really believe we get calls for,” Venables said. “We’ve got calls about someone being locked out of their house, and while that’s not really our deal, we help connect them with a locksmith.”

More: Saline County approves ARPA funding for mental health responders

Venables said he remembers the days before CIT training was widely available. Back then, officers had a completely different approach to mental health calls.

“Police and law enforcement were dealing with people having these mental health issues and… officers didn’t really understand, and maybe they knew they had a mental health issue, but police didn’t really know what to do other than, ‘well if they’re breaking the law, then we’ll take them to jail,” Venables said.

Now, a shift in the culture through education and training of law enforcement officers has provided them with the ability to handle more mental health situations. The focus, Lysell said, is de-escalation and connecting people with resources.

But that, too, has its challenges.

“It’s not illegal for people to have mental health problems, and the community doesn’t always understand that,” Venables said.

More: How a Salina school program helps connect students with mental health services

“You’ll get a call from someone saying: ‘He’s out talking to himself on Santa Fe (Avenue). You need to get him somewhere,’” Lysell said. “But you can’t force someone to get help. They have the freedom to make those choices themselves if they are not a danger to themselves or others.”

If someone is a danger to themselves or others, the law allows officers to take more immediate action. This often leads to officers taking people to a hospital for a mental health evaluation or getting a medical screening.

But after CIT training, officers are better equipped in those situations, too, Venables said.

“It’s really to get a better grasp on what people need in the community,” he said.

Kendrick Calfee has been a reporter with the Salina Journal since 2022, primarily covering government and education. You can reach him at kcalfee@gannett.com or on Twitter (now known as “X”) @calfee_kc.

This article originally appeared on Salina Journal: Salina training equips officers for mental health crisis situations

Source link

The post This program teaches Salina law enforcement how to interact during a mental health crisis appeared first on Minds Valley.

Declining mental health for kids is a growing problem in the U.S. The surgeon general has called it the crisis of our time. But what can schools do? A Cape Cod-based program called Calmer Choice is taking a hands-on approach, helping teach a mindfulness curriculum in the classroom. To learn about how it’s working, GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel talked with Sarah Manion from Calmer Choice and Principal Derek Thompson of Henry Burkland Elementary School in Middleborough, which is using the program. This transcript has been lightly edited.

Sarah Manion: What we do is provide evidence-based mindfulness education, training and mentorship. And the reason for this is we’re trying to build resilience, foster compassion and natural well-being for all people in our community.

Jeremy Siegel: And so what does that exactly look like in practice? Derek, I’ll ask you about your experience at your school in just a second. But Sarah, how do you take those sort of, you know, big, lofty ideas of we need to improve mental health for children and actually put it in a classroom?

Derek Manion: Absolutely. And even mindfulness is kind of a lofty idea. And so what we do is we have a specific eight-week program based on a curriculum that we bring into schools. We have trained instructors who will go in twice a week to K-5 elementary schools and deliver 20 minute lessons that help support kids to learn about mindfulness and the techniques that they can use to build their own internal capacity for resilience.

Siegel: So, Derek, you have incorporated some of this into your school, Henry B. Burkland Elementary School in Middleborough. What’s been your experience?

Thompson: It’s been great actually. To me, what Calmer Choice is about is teaching awareness for the kids. So we talk a lot about how it’s like an inside out approach. Teachers teach, and we talk a lot, about being respectful or what empathy is, but this is about teaching kids how to ground themselves and just be more present and aware. And so it’s a little bit different of an approach than just telling kids what the expectation is. We actually start to teach them how to recognize what it might feel like in that self-awareness that comes along with a practice of mindfulness.

Siegel: How have you seen mental health challenges play out as a problem at your school? I imagine noticing that all of this is a problem was sort of the first step of deciding to do something, like have help from Calmer Choice in your school. What are you seeing from your kids?

Thompson: It’s been interesting seeing what I think has been a slow decline in social skills, in interaction skills. Sometimes for some of our kids, the only place that they’re really interacting with other kids is in the school. And the stress that comes along with learning how to be a friend and how to get along with people and how to navigate social media has really taken a toll on kids. I think we have certainly seen an increase in kids’ acting out behavior, kids struggling to regulate their emotions. We’ve seen an increase in family problems, in families in crisis over the years. So yeah, there’s a lot of layers to that.

Manion: Yeah. And I will be the first one to say that mindfulness is certainly not a cure-all. However, what I do think is really exciting about mindfulness in particular is that it’s not an external skill. It’s really just teaching kids, and adults as well, as Derek pointed out, how to reconnect with our inner capacities that are already there, that we’re born with. We know how to connect with each other. We know how to tap into our emotions. But when there’s so much coming at us in our modern world, it’s disconnection from others, be it the challenges that we’re facing at home, be it social media, it is easy to forget.

Siegel: Principal Thompson, does this work for kids?

Thompson: Yeah, it does. To just piggyback on what Sarah was saying, it’s such an important layer to what we’re trying to do with the kids. Adding a layer of mindfulness on top of it is about practicing it. It’s about noticing what it feels like and it looks like, just slowing down for a minute. You know, I tell my teachers all the time that we need to go slow sometimes in order to get where we want to go, and we’ll go faster if we just slow things down. We’re just in such a rush to get through so many standards and so many expectations and so many lessons throughout a day that this is about taking some time to just slow down, check in with yourself, see where you are. And through that process, we start to bring a lot of what we’re trying to teach our kids to reality.

If you have a hard time regulating your emotions, this is what it feels like. Kids have a hard time paying attention and staying focused; this is what it feels like or what it looks like. And I feel like without it, so many kids have a hard time actually putting those lessons into practice. So it’s important to understand that this is a compliment to a lot of the other pieces that we’re doing in the school on a day-to-day basis.

“We’re planting seeds to create a foundation later in life when those anxieties become very intense.”

-Sarah Manion, Calmer Choice

Siegel: I’m curious: From both of your experiences, is it something that’s at all hard to get kids on board with? Just imagining myself in a classroom years and years ago as a young kid, I can imagine some kids maybe being like, well, I don’t know, I don’t want to take a moment out of my day to breathe or whatever. You know, not necessarily taking it seriously. Is that ever the experience? How do you get kids truly on board with something like this?

Manion: I have a really great story about this because you never know what’s going to touch your kids. And I was doing an interview a few months back and we had a young man call into the radio program, and he was in college and he had received Calmer Choice. And so as an elementary school kid, he said, I did not care for Calmer Choice. I did it, it wasn’t my thing. I was kind of bored during the lessons. But he said, you know, as I went into middle school and then high school and the stressors of those environments really started to affect me, I started having a lot of anxiety and it was then that I actually recalled my Calmer Choice lessons back then, fourth and fifth grade, and I remembered my five finger breathing. I remembered how to take a deep breath and it was really helpful for me.

And that was such a good reminder because you don’t always know. It might be that not every kid is super engaged, but I think that again, we’re planting seeds to create a foundation later in life when those anxieties become very intense and the behaviors can have a greater impact later.

Thompson: Even kids in a classroom who might not be super-invested in all of the strategies we’re teaching, they do benefit and appreciate the calm moments.

Let our headlines come to you.

Morning Edition co-hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel bring a whole new vibe to mornings. Sign up for their newsletter, “The Wake Up,” landing in your inbox every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday morning.

You’re now subscribed.

We’re sorry, something went wrong.

Source link

The post How Calmer Choice teaches mindfulness in elementary schools appeared first on Minds Valley.