The headquarters of the United States Department of Justice in Washington. (Liu Jie/Xinhua/Zuma Press/TNS)
Just as paramedics respond to physical health emergencies, the U.S. Department of Justice says behavioral health professionals (not police) should respond to mental health crises to prevent disability discrimination.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires public entities to make reasonable accommodations to ensure that people with disabilities can benefit from programs, services and activities, and that includes emergency response, the Justice Department said in a Declaration of interest recently filed in a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia known as Bread for the City v. District of Columbia.
In this sense, the statement indicates that public entities must adapt their emergency response to avoid discrimination based on disability. That may mean sending mobile crisis teams made up of behavioral health professionals instead of police on mental health calls.
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“Despatching mobile crisis response teams to mental health emergencies when appropriate is similar to dispatching EMTs to a reported heart attack,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Relying on a less effective and potentially harmful response to people experiencing mental health emergencies may deprive people with mental health disabilities of equal opportunities to benefit from a critical public service.”
In the case at hand, Bread for the City, a nonprofit organization that provides physical and behavioral health care, legal services, food, clothing, and social services to low-income residents of Washington, DC, maintains that it is depleting your resources by devoting a lot of time and energy to reducing mental health crises to avoid calling 911.
“Bread has learned from experience that calling 911 for a client in a mental health crisis is not an appropriate solution to a mental health crisis because it puts that client at risk of harm and reduces the client’s trust (and other customers who witness the situation) incident, I have in Bread,” the group said in its complaint. “If calling 911 allowed mental health professionals to respond quickly to a mental health crisis, Bread could redirect important resources to its core programs.”
The Justice Department cited guide It was published last year with the Department of Health and Human Services and addresses emergency response for people with behavioral health and other disabilities. Additionally, the department said it recently completed investigations in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, that found discrimination against people with behavioral health disabilities in emergency response systems.
A seperation brief The argument that Washington, D.C. needs to expand its mental health crisis services has also been made in the case by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the American Association of People with Disabilities and eight other groups.
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