Cookeville Launches Mental Health First Responder

The Cookeville Community Response program officially launched Monday, allowing the city to use mental health professionals as first responders in certain situations.

Fire Chief Benton Young said they will send one of their EMTs with a mental health clinician to calls where people may be in distress or are having a mental health crisis. Young said this system will allow those individuals to get the treatment and resources they need to address their underlying issues.

“That EMT on board helps facilitate the calls, knows the city very well so they know the locations,” Young said. “They’re also an EMT so they can address any medical issues that person may be having, does that person need to be transported by the ambulance, are they having other medical conditions.”

Police Major Scott Winfree said dispatchers will handle the relevant calls and determine if a situation requires a law enforcement officer or a mental health worker to respond. Winfree said this program frees up their officers to handle other calls where they are needed more.

“Those are really not law enforcement type calls,” Winfree said. “These are people, a lot of times, who are in some type of crisis but they need other resources than what we can provide. And therefore the mental health provider, the paramedic can assess them.”

Young said the program is a joint effort with Volunteer Behavioral Health, which organized the program with help from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“The program’s based on other, larger cities,” Young said. “This is one of the smaller cities they’ve done this program with nationally. So if it works in these bigger cities, the hope is it’ll work in the smaller cities as well.”

Young said they have been working on the program since the police department received a grant for it a couple years ago.

“We started it back probably actively running calls about six weeks ago to work out all the, any issues we had,” Young said. “And we had feedback from our CCR team and changed a few things and tweaked it.”