L to R: Assistant Chief Chris Clements, Officer Rachel Roberts, and Sgt. Steve Dickens of the Lewisville Police Department. Click photo to open full-size image.
Guest speaker Sergeant Steve Dickens of the Lewisville Police Department last week shared about the city's efforts to better serve people needing psychiatric counseling through the department's CoCare Unit for People in Crisis.
Getting a mental health call, especially if someone was suicidal, was always very stressful for officers, explained Sgt. Dickens, who oversees both the Neighborhood Resource Officer and CoCare Units. Officers typically would spend hours sitting with an individual waiting for a social worker to come and feel frustrated because they could not offer any real assistance. Thanks to recent legislative changes, however, law enforcement officers now have authority to bring a person in a mental health crisis to an inpatient facility where they can get appropriate care.
Following the enactment of the legislation, Lewisville PD launched a team in June 2021 to help when dispatchers get a mental health call. Officers who volunteer with the CoCare Unit have undergone 40 hours of specialized training to be better equipped to meet the needs of people in a mental health crisis and also later follow up with them to ensure they are getting needed counseling.
The department ran more than 1300 mental health calls in 2022 and referred the majority of those individuals to a mental health facility, Sgt. Dickens noted. “We find the people with insurance have access to mental health care and they get it,” whereas those without coverage often go without proper care, rely on the state’s overburdened MHMR services, or simply face trouble getting to their appointments, he said. Volunteers in the CoCare Unit often try to stand in the gap, providing transportation and acting as surrogate social workers to help people in need.“I’ve seen improvement in how we, as a community, view mental health” in recent years, said Sgt. Dickens, and the stigma has been significantly reduced. In the same way we don’t think poorly of individuals with diabetes, we are seeing a gradual mindset shift as people come to understand that mental health issues, like depression or anxiety, have both lifestyle and biological components and those in crisis cannot simply “fix” the problem without help.
To learn more, check out this article on the CoCare Unit from the Lewisville Leader, or email Sgt. Dickens at sdickens@cityoflewisville.com.