On Aug. 1, the Cook County Health Office of Behavioral Health, Austin Coming Together, Austin Garden Collective and BUILD Chicago hosted a “Let’s Grow Together” event at BUILD’s headquarters in Austin for a morning of gardening, community connection and learning about behavioral health resources available in the community.
The gardening portion of the event was supposed to be from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., when these organizations would have the opportunity to connect with the neighborhood while helping care for local community gardens. However, as rainy conditions persisted from the night before, working outdoors was not ideal, Goyal said, so they were forced to cancel that programming.
The information session was held from noon to 1 p.m. at 5100 W Harrison St. to inform participants about local behavioral health crisis resources available to individuals and families seeking support. Speakers from NAMI Chicago, UCAN and CARE answered questions about how they work within the community and how they can better address one another’s gaps in services.
Swati Goyal, a community mobilization coordinator for the Cook County Health Office of Behavioral Health, said the event was created to pair behavioral crisis resources with community service. Rather than just doing their typical tabling, Goyal said they wanted to show up in the community and participate in activities together to better educate community members about available resources.
Another attendee was the Department of Public Health’s Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement Program (CARE), an alternative to 911 response, said Tiffany Patton-Burnside, the senior director of Crisis Services.
“Our qualifiers are no violence, no weapons, no physical injury, no active suicide attempt,” Patton-Burnside said. “Other than that, CARE team, as long as we’re available on scene, you will get a licensed clinician and an EMT.”
In scenarios with safety implications, law enforcement is the first to show up and stabilize the situation; after that, behavioral health crisis teams co-respond to the scene.
“It’s not that we don’t show up; we’re just not the first people to show up,” Patton-Burnside said.
Everyone who CARE responds to gets a needs assessment, along with a psychosocial assessment and any needed de-escalation, Patton-Burnside said, but the needs assessment is done “in an effort to find out what really is going on.”
The CARE team is capable of transporting to hospitals, as well as to alternate destinations like living rooms, a crisis stabilization unit, or even a Walgreens “because solving the problem means getting you to your prescription or taking you to your aunt’s house because the problem is a little bit more family related, and we need to get you someplace safe,” Patton-Burnside said.
“The team does all of those wonderful, amazing things just to ensure that we peel back the layers of the purpose of the crisis,” she said. “Just because a person has a mental illness, that’s not usually the crisis. The crisis is four other things that have happened on top of the mental illness that have now caused this person’s life to be unmanageable. So, the goal is for us to get you back to manageability and decrease that likelihood of this particular crisis from happening again.”
The program currently operates Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and will extend to 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. this fall. While the mayor’s goal is to eventually have the team available 24/7, 365 days a year, Patton-Burnside said, they just don’t have the resources yet.
CARE responds to individuals throughout the city with about a dozen refitted small ambulances. While it is restricted by the city limits of Chicago and, for now, operates for six-and-a-half hours, five days a week, other groups, such as UCAN, do what they can to provide as much support as possible.
Randy Sadler, senior vice president of Therapeutic and Clinical Services at UCAN, said their services are available as south as Bronzeville, as east as the lake, as west as Harlem, and as north as Evanston and Skokie. While they don’t have emergency transportation, Sadler said they make up for it by having many team members across Chicagoland.
UCAN provides mobile crisis responses and a myriad of mental health services for the uninsured and underinsured, Sadler said. He added that it is spaces like the one created on Aug. 1 that allow these organizations to get together and learn what one another does.
“I’m just curious how the people in this room can all work together to help activate what is here in different ways and get strategic about it because there are some holes,” said Chamika Moore, development director at Austin Garden Collective. “We do have a lot of resources at our disposal, so how can we work together collectively to bridge those gaps and give the help to the community that needs it?”
She said there has been an influx of mental health and behavioral health issues in and around Austin.
“I’m just hearing opportunities for people to connect in different ways, to make what is available work better for the community,” Moore said.
Emma Bradford is an intern for NEWSWELL CHICAGO through Report for America’s Local News Internship Program.