While on a ride-along with a police officer, he asked what calls concerned the officer the most. The answer he got was “immediate detention,” a situation that occurs when the subject must be detained because he is a danger to himself or others.
And how often does that occur? About every other shift, the officer said.
“I started looking into some preliminary numbers,” Fadness said, “and sure enough, we detained 175 to 180 people that year and there were 12 suicides.”
It made Fadness think: A community of about 90,000 with just three homicides in the last 20 years had 12 suicides and 175 immediate detentions in one year. “The question then was ‘What can we do and what should we do?’”
Fadness assigned his fire chief, Steve Orusa, the challenge of figuring that out. Over the next year, they developed a mental health initiative to equip first responders and community members with the tools to begin to deal with the problem.
Phase one was internal, developing coordination between police, fire, schools, churches and clinicians to better understand what was occurring. “There are huge training gaps and huge data gaps,” Fadness said. “We couldn’t even get good numbers on how many people we detained or how many suicides there were, it was all bifurcated between police and fire.”
Now, as police and fire collaborate on the issue, and do a monthly audit on mental health runs to find gaps in services, Orusa said. “Before this, we’d talk but never shared data on mental health, so we’ve really teamed up with an intelligence presence.”
Along with gaining a better grip on the numbers, Fishers paid a consultant $50,000 a year and got crisis intervention training for fire, paramedics and 60 percent of the police department so far. But the coordination layered within various entities is as valuable as the training.
For example, recently a student posted on Instagram a picture of himself with a gun and words that indicated he was suicidal. The post was spotted by a group of high school students who had started their own mental health club within the school system as part of the program. They alerted the new mental health coordinator for the school system, who alerted school resource officers, who alerted the local police.
The police department quickly identified the student and coordinated care with the local mental health facilities.
“Each one of those steps would not have been there if not for this initiative,” Fadness said.
That’s part of the communitywide scope Fadness hopes the program achieves.
“One of the first steps was to educate our people and put a value on servicing people with mental health issues,” Orusa said. “You can [be a hero and] save somebody who’s shot but what about the person who comes up to a firefighter or police man and says, ‘I’m anxious and depressed?’”
Fadness said that of the 30 people who committed suicide in the last three years, none was on anyone’s radar and 15 had not communicated any intentions ahead of time.
“What we believe is the next step is bringing down the cultural barrier of people talking about their mental health challenges,” he said. “We’re making this more of an awareness campaign so our residents know what to do and where the resources are for people with these challenges.”
