Psychiatrists Can Help Train Police in Crisis Response

Police departments across the United States are increasingly being called to serve as first responders for people experiencing mental health crises.

Tragically, these encounters too often result in arrests, injury, or far worse. Of the 987 people shot to death by police officers in 2017, mental illness was known to have played a role in one quarter of these incidents, according to an ongoing national study by the Washington Post.

“What training, if any, do police officers have in interactions with people experiencing mental illness?” asked Chandan Khandai, M.D., a consultation-liaison psychiatry fellow at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “Often they say ‘I don’t know what to do. I was never trained for this. I’m just trying to do my job.’” Khandai hopes that more police officers will receive Crisis Intervention Team training, also known as CIT, and that psychiatrists will assume a bigger role in shaping these programs.

Khandai will be participating in the session “Law Enforcement-Mental Health Interactions and the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Model” at IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference, which is being held October 4 to 7 in Chicago.

“This is an easy, concrete way of helping our patient population by getting involved in this,” he said. “The more partners we can develop outside of the traditional medical and mental health care setting, the better off our patients will be.”

Khandai, himself a native Chicagoan, attended CIT training this past May with the Chicago Police Department and was one of the first psychiatrists to attend the program. “It was quite an eye-opening experience,” he said. “I never fully appreciated the difficulties that officers face when trying to handle mental health–related calls—not having a medical background, having incomplete information, having to balance doing what’s best for the individual with keeping the community safe.”

Research has demonstrated that CIT helps both officers and patients: it boosts police officers’ knowledge of mental health issues and de-escalation techniques, raises referrals of people with mental illness to treatment venues, and lowers the likelihood of arrest and incarceration for individuals experiencing a crisis, he said.

In Chicago, the training takes place in studios that are designed to look like houses or bars, and with individuals who have experienced mental illness acting out scenarios with police trainees. Both police officers and the “actors” benefit. “This allows them to reenact their bad experiences with police officers and get a better outcome,” he said. The police officer who heads Chicago’s CIT training will also be speaking at the session. ■