Nashville 'Mental Health ER' Coming To MetroCenter

NASHVILLE, TN — Metro Police spend an estimated 5,000 hours annually handling mental health crises and the city, looking for a better and more efficient way to handle these emergencies, is opening a $3.5 million Mental Health Crisis Service Center next year.

The new 20-bed facility, which will be located on the Mental Health Cooperative's MetroCenter campus which has 23 beds itself, will be available for police to drop off those they encounter with a mental health issue as well for the general public. In addition, the facility is aimed at battling drug addiction. Currently, people seeking help for addiction — particularly those who are uninsured or under-insured — end up in a traditional emergency room or struggle finding a rehab facility that will admit them.

The new center will help connect those with mental illnesses, including addiction, get connected to the help they need as quickly as possible, and get police officers back on duty. Now, because getting a mental health evaluation from a traditional hospital is often a lengthy process, officers have to wait with the patient. As Dr. Bill Paul, Metro's director of health, told The Tennessean, that increases the "odds of doing something that gets (them) on the wrong side of the law."

The facility, set for a groundbreaking in early 2018 with a fall opening date, will be available to walk-in or drop-off patients. It's being funded by $2.6 million from the Tennessee Department Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, plus $427,538 from Metro and 4447,463 from the MHC.

The goal, Paul told NewsChannel 5, is to have police officers back on duty within 10 minutes.

"When somebody's suffering from mental illness, and they're in crisis, a lot of times families are frustrated, they don't know what to do. Sometimes there is behavior that makes people really feel the need to call police for assistance. A lot of time, these people really need treatment. They don't really need to be kept in jail," he told the station.

Though police are trained in handling people in a mental-health crisis, it's not an ideal situation.

"You wouldn't take someone with an appendicitis to jail. You'd take them to the ER," Angie Thompson, ‎the Metro health department's director of behavioral health services, told The Tennessean.

This approach will not only speed-up intervention times, it will also keep the blemish of a jail booking off the record of a person with a mental illness.

Image via Metro Nashville