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Plant a few dahlias, Dahling Hello, honey: Invite bees for a lush garden Health St. Mary's student helps others with diabetes Community blog: Sleep Tight: Making Your Bed, Body and Mind Ready for Rest Health Watch: 5 tips for seasonal allergy relief A better bedtime Studying stress Hiking Biking Faith Religion briefs Religion News: Presbyterian Church gives approval on same-sex marriage Religion briefs: Friday, March 13 More religion events in the Rogue Valley Religion Briefs Milestones and Achievements Haga-Parks Exercise helps special-needs kids adjust to airport procedures Engagement: Workman-Wright Columnist for a Day Rogue Healthy Aging Tempo Latest stories Alan Berman Trio plays the Imperial Ballroom in Medford Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' opens at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival The Brothers Reed win a slot in the Rising Stars finals Pimps of Joytime play Historic Ashland Armory Here's five top entertainment picks for the coming week Theater Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' opens at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Camelot's 'Sunset Boulevard' ambitious, not as dark Andrew Lloyd Webber's lush musical 'Sunset Boulevard' opens at Camelot Theatre in Talent Review: Thanks for the Memories pulls off challenging 'Anastasia' Review: 'Same Time' after all these years Music Pimps of Joytime play Historic Ashland Armory Live Music in Local Clubs Alt-rock band Key of Three is a contender this weekend at Rising Stars Improv rock and folk band hosts a dance party at the Ashland Community Center Kites & Crows, Ryan Marchand and Mercy Duo face-off this weekend at Rising Stars music competition in Jacksonville Community Events Rogue Valley artist Linda Evans' pastel paintings capture landscapes of Southern Oregon Ashland Independent Film Festival announces this year's lineup OSF Hip-Hop Poetry Open Mic Ashland's First Friday Art Walk showcases new exhibits by regional artists Jesse Lawson and Joe Moxley host 'Barkeeper' Dining Parsing the meaning behind wine medals and scores Restaurant Inspections: Sunday, March 22 Jasmine Thai Cuisine Restaurant Inspections Agave offers gourmet tacos, tamales, ensaladas and more Tempo Videos Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » Obits Blogs TV Listings Movie Listings Oregon Outdoors Oregon Healthy Living Magazines/Special Sections Business Services NEWS NOW Gold Hill man suspected of window-smashing spree in Grants Pass ... Our View: Public records rules should apply to lawmakers, too ... Corps hopes to clear Lost Creek Lake of debris ... Gold Hill man suspected of window-smashing spree in Grants Pass ... Our View: Public records rules should apply to lawmakers, too ... Corps hopes to clear Lost Creek Lake of debris ... SUNDAY FOCUS: MENTAL HEALTH AND THE LAW Crisis intervention: Medford police take training in response to surge in mental health calls By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 22, 2015 @ 2:00 am Updated Mar 22, 2015 at 11:06 AM By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 22, 2015 @ 2:00 am Updated Mar 22, 2015 at 11:06 AM » Social News p bs:newslist StartDate="20121121" EndDate="p bs:datecalc Months="3"" DateSort="1" UseObjects="1" ObjectClass="81" Taxonomywords="2325,665" ExactTaxonomyMatch="1" Image="1" Count="4" --> It's a situation law enforcement officers face at least once, if not many times, in their career: a disorderly subject refusing to comply with police commands, speaking to someone only he can hear, giving irrational reasons for his bizarre behavior. In a classroom at the county’s emergency dispatch center near the Medford airport, 17 law enforcement officers and corrections staff members find themselves struggling to focus on the words of Medford police Lt. Curtis Whipple as he lectures on the symptoms of schizophrenia. The officers are wearing headsets playing recordings of eerie, menacing voices simulating the symptoms. They hear whispers. Shouts. Nonsensical phrases. Verbal assaults: "You stink." "You are garbage." "They know about you. They know what you've done." The class is part of the sixth crisis-intervention training session held by the Medford Police Department to give law enforcement officers the tools to peacefully resolve situations involving the emotionally and psychologically distraught. Whipple says the training isn’t required by the state, but local agencies have found the new skill set increasingly valuable as they've been overwhelmed by mental health calls in recent years. Between 2012 and 2014, Medford police alone saw a 38 percent increase in their referrals to Jackson County Mental Health and a 28 percent increase in their holds on people with mental illnesses. Whipple, a 19-year Medford veteran who commands the department’s patrol division, says the rise in reports filed can be attributed to both an increase in actual incidents and officers getting better at identifying signs of mental illness. "We all have our own people (with mental illnesses) we deal with regularly," he tells the officers assembled at the training, held March 10. Every head in the classroom nods. The grim potential of those calls hit home Tuesday when a 49-year-old Medford man was shot and killed by SWAT team members following a standoff. Andrew Charles Shipley, who police say had mental health issues, armed and barricaded himself inside a west Medford home for 19 hours before opening the garage door and allegedly firing once at officers. Seven officers returned fire. They are currently on paid administrative leave, pending an investigation of the shooting by the Jackson County Major Assault and Death Investigation Unit. Its findings are expected to be presented to a grand jury in coming weeks. "This isn't how we wanted this to end," Medford police Chief Tim George told reporters at the scene, a bulletproof vest strapped over his dress shirt. "Unfortunately, when firearms get brought into these situations, things can get dangerous and violent very quickly." A similar situation Oct. 2 ended peacefully when SWAT negotiators were able to establish a dialogue with a suicidal veteran who had barricaded herself in her north Medford apartment. At one point, negotiators "friended" the woman on Facebook, helping to build her trust. Department spokesperson Lt. Mike Budreau says calls such as Tuesday's standoff can force police to stretch their existing manpower, requiring multiple officers to maintain a perimeter, trained negotiators to communicate with the suspect and a tactical unit to handle any dangerous events that may arise. "It takes a lot of cops to contain this scene on a constant 24/7 basis," Budreau said at the scene. "It takes us away from other duties that we could be doing — it's a huge resource drain." Learning how to de-escalate mental health crises in the field is also critical because psychiatric housing is in short supply in Jackson County. The Behavioral Health Unit at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center, commonly known as "Two North," has only 18 beds, which often are full when officers arrive at the emergency room with a person in crisis. If a drug test shows the person is intoxicated, he must be transported to the county's only detox facility, the William H. Moore Center in Medford, according to hospital policy. George says that sometimes the best option an officer is left with is to drive the person around in the back of the patrol vehicle for awhile until he calms down. Whipple says Oregon law sets a fairly high bar for what situations justify a mental hold by a police officer. While it's fairly easy for officers to detain a person who's made threats to harm another, it can sometimes be difficult to prove someone is a danger to himself unless he makes an explicit threat of self-harm. Once an officer does take someone into custody on a mental hold, that person has to be taken to the emergency room of a local hospital for triage and evaluation. Whipple says that building empathy for the mentally ill is a key component of the training, and one the schizophrenia-simulating headsets are intended to encourage. "We're not giving up officer safety, but it helps if you can relate to them," he tells the class. Phoenix police Officer Glenn Patchett says the distracting audio made it difficult to focus on the instructors and that he could see how that state of mind would make interacting with officers difficult. A jail deputy in the class says some of the questions corrections staff ask during the intake process are whether the prisoner is hearing voices and whether he's on medication for any mental health conditions. Whipple stresses that it's important to identify any underlying condition early on in any unusual contacts. "One of the easiest ways to do it is to ask, 'Do you hear anybody talking here besides you and me?'" Whipple says. Often, people with underlying mental illness already have been diagnosed and have known about their condition for awhile, he adds. A key factor in preventing those calls from escalating is assessing the suspect's feelings at the time of that first contact. "Ask them, 'What are the voices telling you to do?'" he tells the class, using a hypothetical subject with schizophrenia as an example. "If the voices are telling you to take a gun and shoot me, I want to know that." While there is often a correlation between drug abuse and chronic mental illness in the eyes of law enforcement, it's not necessarily accurate to say that drug abuse causes mental illness, Whipple says. Often, many disorders don't begin to manifest until late teens or early adulthood. "It's the old, 'What came first — the chicken or the egg?'" he says. Whipple is a proponent of the so-called “Memphis model” of crisis intervention, pioneered by the Memphis, Tenn., police department in the late 1980s. The approach draws patrol officers into a partnership with local mental health and community outreach figures in an attempt to bridge the historic gap between social services and law enforcement. One of those organizations is the Compass House, a rehabilitative "clubhouse" for people with mental illnesses that opened its doors in Medford last summer. Executive Director Matt Vorderstrasse says the organization, which provides meals, treatment and employment assistance to its clients, formed as a result of the closure of the Hawthorne Center and the DASIL drop-in center in 2013. "The majority of our members are referred (to us) through Jackson County Mental Health, but others are referred through Asante's Behavioral Health Unit," he says, watching police officers sit down for lunch with members after a morning training session. Whipple has been on the board of the Compass House since it opened, a move he credits to his role in the crisis-intervention training program. “They kind of grew out of each other,” he says. Eating lunch with a Compass House client after the morning's training session, Medford police Cpl. Chris Dode and Officer Levi Friend say that while they sometimes deal with people with mental illness in a domestic setting, most of the people they get calls about are transients. Most keep to their own spots in town, Friend says, but it's not uncommon for transients to suddenly change neighborhoods, prompting officers in that beat to call their cross-town colleagues for background information. Many of the calls police get are during business hours from shopkeepers worried about their customers being scared away, he says. Whipple says that getting people to accept the help they need is one of the biggest challenges both law enforcement and social services face. Pointing to schizophrenia as an example, Whipple says the medication on the market works at least 70 percent of the time; the important thing is to make sure the people who need it are taking it. Under most circumstances, private citizens can't be compelled to take medication against their will, he says, so reducing the stigma of such treatment is vital. "If we can help to change society's view of mental health, we can help those individuals (help) themselves," he says. Reporter Ryan Pfeil contributed to this story. Reach reporter Thomas Moriarty at 541-776-4471, or by email at [email protected] . Follow him at @ThomasDMoriarty . By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 22, 2015 @ 2:00 am Updated Mar 22, 2015 at 11:06 AM » Comment or view comments /* $( document ).ready(function() { // Jquery mobile is trying to style the button and leaving a blank gry button on top of a white button $("#viafouracoms .vf-comment-controls li.vf-right").html(' Submit '); });*/ » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. calendar Connect with MailTribune.com Facebook Twitter RSS Back to top Reader Services Reader Services Home Subscriptions Subscriber controls Contact us Submissions Photos Events Letters to the editor Corrections Announcements Obituaries Story ideas Since you asked Alerts Email Alerts RSS Feeds Text Alerts Advertise Media Kit Home Products and services Ad rates Advertising contacts Mail Tribune Daily Tidings The Nickel Shop Our Valley Blogs Stay Informed Email newsletter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. 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