By the time Kiki Radermacher, a mental health therapist, arrived at a Missoula, Mont., home on an emergency 911 call in late May, the man who lived there and had called for help was backed into a corner and yelling at police officers.
The place he was renting was about to be sold. He had called 911 when his fear of becoming homeless turned to thoughts of killing himself.
“I asked him, ‘Will you sit with me?’ ” recalled Radermacher, a member of the city’s mobile crisis response team who answered the call with a medic and talked with the man that day, helping connect him with support services. “We really want to empower people, to find solutions.”
Missoula began sending this special crew on emergency mental health calls in November as a pilot project; next month the program will become permanent. It’s one of six mobile crisis response initiatives in Montana — up from one at the start of 2019. And four more local governments have applied for state grants this year to start teams.
