Mental health on police front line
13 Oct, 2011 04:00 AM
Newly-recruited mental health clinicians working with ACT Policing have provided officers with support and advice for nearly 700 incidents in seven months, new figures show.
Since March, two mental health clinicians from ACT Health have been embedded in the operations control room of ACT Policing.
From there, they take calls from frontline officers dealing with mental health incidents, providing them with clinical advice, and a patient's treatment and medical history.
The recruitment of the clinicians is part of the Mental Health Community Policing Initiative, a major push by police, in partnership with ACT Health, to better respond to the huge volumes of mental health incidents police attend to in the ACT.
Mental health jobs account for 10 per cent of all incidents, and police spend around 80 minutes on each.
Mental health clinicians have fielded 671 calls from frontline officers since the initiative was launched in March.
All of the territory's frontline police will also undergo a four-day mental health training program by mid-next year. Just 89 have undergone training so far.
The initiative's team leader, Sergeant Greg Booth, said the training was providing officers with skills that were invaluable in responding to mental health issues, and were helping to divert mental health sufferers into appropriate care.
''It's bad enough to be unwell, it's worse to have the police turn up, and then if the police aren't quite understanding what's going on then it just compounds all of the issues,'' Sergeant Booth said.
''What we're really looking to do, through our partnerships with ACT Health, through the training that we're delivering to our guys, is to deliver to the community a first-rate policing service,'' he said.
As part of the training, mental health sufferers and carers share their personal stories and experiences with mental illness.
Mental Illness Education ACT volunteer Annie Brown-Bryan, who suffered severe depression and attempted suicide, was one of those helping to train police officers. ''A couple of them were quite moved, but mainly they were interested in why,'' she said. ''My own why is because, even though I have a loving partner and great friends and family, I felt that life just wasn't worth living and I couldn't hear all of the good things going on in my life.
''It helped particularly one police officer who had attended his first suicide attempt, and he was really questioning why do people do it.
''Any sort of knowledge about what it is like to live the experience has got to be a good thing, so I think it's a very important thing that they're doing.''
Former mental health carer and Mental Illness Education volunteer Craig Allatt told police how a psychotic episode could affect anyone.
''Most people reacted to my story with some disbelief ... they found it quite valuable to see how an illness can affect anybody at any stage of their life, and it can have fatal consequences,'' Mr Allatt said.
''When [the police] get called, they'll hopefully have a better understanding of what they're dealing with.''
