Thread by @LoveyCooper

I spent 8 hours on Friday night navigating my local mental health crisis response efforts to find emergency care for a loved one. They’re safe now, and I’m exhausted. But I have SEVERAL observations to share…

At 9 pm, we went to the only mental health crisis facility listed on the county’s website, a 20 minute drive. When we got there, we were told would have to wait outside in the car for at least 3 hours before they were available for any sort of screening.

The wait was because someone had just checked in for drug detox and they could only support one patient at a time. They didn’t have recommendations on where else to go.

I called the only other 24 hour crisis response center listed for another county. They said they had capacity and to come on in. Another 20 minute drive later, we were turned away at the door because they were not equipped to handle the specifics of the kind of crisis we were in.

They gave us two other recommendations for facilities another 30 minutes away. The first straight up told us on the phone that they did not have enough staff. The other was more promising and gave us a check in appointment time at midnight.

When we got there, we waited outside with another patient for another 30 minutes past our appointment time before they opened the door. Nobody was at the front desk to let us in or let anyone else out.

We sat in that waiting room for 3 hours—until 3 am—with several people in crisis under no supervision, and with nobody to unlock the door to let anyone out to leave.

In those 3 hours, I staff tell a teenager who had overdosed and woken up from the narcan in the waiting room that his case was not a high priority the night, so the earliest he would be seen was 6 am. This is after waiting over 3 hours without being seen by staff. He left.

A man who was coming in for addiction treatment, who arrived just after us, told me he had driven 4 hours to get there because it was the only facility covered by his insurance. After 2 hours, they told him his potential cost of treatment would still be over $10,000, and he left.

A cop showed up around 2 am to serve court papers to someone in a 24 hour hold. Staff had to wake them up and bring him out of treatment to receive the papers in the waiting room, because the officer didn’t want to put his gun in a locker in order to enter the patient area.

A clearly inebriated man who had been there for upwards for 6 hours was told that because he had been there once before, his case was not an emergency, so he needed to make an appointment. The earliest available was next week.

We left at 4:30 am. I’m exhausted, and my loved one is safe. The emergency room was never an option for us, mind you. We’re figuring out the other details later. I hope this can serve as some kind of testament to our need for better mental health care in this county. That’s all.