Crisis Response

Crisis response is an important topic in recovery. It's the intersection between wellness and needing assistance many times. I think recognizing the need for assistance is especially challenging with behavioral health conditions. I recently assisted a woman whose daughter was having trouble breathing, we called 911 together. What was so striking to me was that the mother wasn't sure what to do even though her daughter was having trouble breathing. She wasn't sure whether or not she should call 911. Her comment was I simply don't know what's going on. Imagine if this had been a psychological crisis. Would the mother know what to do?  Would responders even know how to respond even?  And in my experience this has been an extremely questionable. I've got an appropriate responses maybe one out of five times. And by appropriate I mean someone responded with care, even poor care is better than ignoring and not responding in my humble opinion. Crisis services need to grow in the United States to where we have adequate responses for people in crisis with behavioral health conditions. We need more crisis respites that are peer run with access to ERs. We need to interact with the clinical community in these peer run facilities when medical responses are appropriate. We need to be talking to our communities about our supports so that people aren't blindsided with what do I do in a crisis.