SEATTLE — Starting this spring, the University of Washington will try a new approach to helping students and employees in mental health crises, based on a philosophy that's become increasingly mainstream: Mental health professionals are better equipped than police to respond to some emergencies.

In emergencies that don't involve a safety risk, a new campus crisis response team will respond with, or instead of, the UW Police Department to support students, faculty and staff experiencing acute mental health crises. The team aims to deescalate crises and help the person in crisis connect to other services.

Programs that send mental health professionals to respond to crises as a supplement to or replacement for police officers have grown in recent years. Seattle is planning to expand its pilot program that sends crisis responders to some 911 calls. King County recently expanded its program that sends mobile crisis teams, dispatched by 988 calls, to mental health emergencies around the county.

Applying the idea to college campuses is newer. A 2023 report from students at UW's Evans School of Public Policy and Governance identified similar crisis response programs at eight universities around the country; the oldest program, at Johns Hopkins University, launched in August 2021.

Traditionally, police and fire have responded to mental health crises because they're set up as 24/7 systems, UW Counseling Center director Natacha Foo Kune said. UW leaders hope the new program will provide another tool that's better suited to respond specifically to mental health emergencies.

"Now that it's becoming more of a common issue, we need to think through, what's the next system that makes sense to address that?" Foo Kune said. "This is the experiment we want to participate in to be able to respond to mental health crises on our campus."

After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked significant protests against police violence in the summer of 2020, then-UW President Ana Mari Cauce announced that the university would begin "reimagining" campus safety and the best way to respond to emergencies.

A university working group began examining how to best support people in acute mental health crises, said Sally Clark, vice president of the division.

"Some of that was from things that folks had seen or experienced at UW over the years, but I think it was also just part of the broader evaluation of what happens outside of this community," Clark said. "Too often, law enforcement is called on to respond, and too often law enforcement has found that they've not been well equipped in order to have the response that they want to have, let alone the response that the community wants to have. And in some of those cases, there have been really tragic results for everybody."

The university created a new Division of Campus Community Safety in 2022 to house three different organizations doing similar work: SafeCampus (the university's violence prevention and threat assessment team), Emergency Management (focused on disaster preparedness and crisis communications) and the UW Police Department.

Right now, 911 calls lead to a response by UW Police, which has jurisdiction over campus and university-owned buildings in the University District. UW Housing and Food Services also employs two care specialists who support the more than 9,000 students who live on campus.

The care specialists mostly respond to mental health concerns, including depression and sometimes suicidal ideation, but also support students experiencing roommate conflicts, homesickness or other mental health challenges, director of Residential Life Vicki Vanderwerf said. They help connect students to on-campus resources so they can progress toward graduation.

Here's how Clark anticipates the new crisis response team will work: When a call comes in to 911 or the UW Police nonemergency line, dispatchers will ask callers about the situation and assess whether there are safety risks that require police response. If the emergency seems mental health-related but doesn't present safety risks, a team of two mental health professionals will respond, aiming to stabilize the situation and connect the student, faculty or staff member to resources like the campus counseling center.

The workflow sounds straightforward, but Clark knows it will require building trust with dispatchers and law enforcement. Residential Life staff and professors may also make referrals to the team.

"I don't think you can do it without collaboration: figuring out how these calls work best for everybody, that ensure everybody's safety and ensure the most effective response is happening for both the individual and the community," Clark said. "I think law enforcement has to be in the room to collaborate on that."

There are still questions to be ironed out before the program's planned launch in the spring: What will the hours be? How will the crisis responders collaborate with the existing Housing and Food Services care specialists? Where will students or employees be referred to if they require more intensive mental health care?

The university is hiring a program manager for the new team, who will help hire crisis responders and find the answers to these questions. Clark hopes the team will have a "soft rollout" in the spring 2025 quarter, continue streamlining its work over the summer with fewer students on campus and be ready to fully operate in the fall.

Oregon State University, which has run a campus crisis response program since fall 2022, has provided valuable lessons for UW as it plans to launch its program. The four-person OSU Assist team responds to calls on campus involving mental health and wellness where there is no reported violence or weapons.

The most common calls are student mental health crises, including thoughts of suicide or panic attacks, director of Student Care Services Aubrie Piper said. The team has also conducted welfare checks, supported survivors of gender-based violence and helped students who are going through housing or financial insecurity.

Learning how to coordinate a response between crisis responders and the university's department of public safety has been a learning process, Piper said — the different teams have to determine who's taking the lead if they respond to a call together.

"We've continued to navigate and learn together just how to do that choreography," Piper said. "As folks build trust and learn the different strengths that folks have in crisis calls, we've seen that evolve really positively, especially in the past year and a half."

The team received 152 calls in the 2022-23 school year, and that number jumped to 246 calls the next school year. Eighty-four percent of calls were students, and 16% were faculty, staff or community members.

UW also plans to support faculty, staff and community members with its crisis response team. A team from UW visited Oregon State this fall to help understand the structure and what to expect.

"We often think about students in one way with a certain set of resources, and then employees in another way with a certain set of resources," Glenna Chang, UW's associate vice president for student life, said. "This is going to be an interesting blending of supporting our community members."

Focus groups have shown that OSU students see the crisis response team as an "invaluable resource," Piper said. Two years in, they're thinking about how to expand; right now, the team operates from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. every day. Partnering with the university to be a practicum site for graduate students studying social work or counseling could be one option, Piper said.

Building awareness is also a key focus — particularly since the idea of crisis response as a "fourth branch" of emergency response, in addition to police, fire and emergency medical services, is still fairly new to the general public.

"The ecosystem of crisis response has been predominantly reliant on the three branches that have already existed," Piper said. "It's taking some time to really build (alternative response) into muscle memory and culture knowledge, and that can't be built overnight."

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