Aspen Hope Center a beacon in crisis; response with mental health clinicians leads to better outcomes than police contact, data suggests

The Aspen Times
Anna Meyer
July 23, 2023

The Aspen Hope Center crisis clinicians start each 24-hour shift with no idea what to expect.

“You cannot plan a crisis,” said the center’s crisis supervisor, Skylar Severson.

In addition to serving as the in-person response contractor for calls to law enforcement, emergency medical services, and — as of July 1 — the state hotline, the Hope Center also operates its own crisis line.

In recent years, the Hope Center has tracked a significant increase in the number of individuals requesting crisis services.

In 2021, Hope Center crisis clinicians served 1,085 new individuals, amounting to a 15% increase over 2020 and a 26% increase from 2019, according to their website.

Of the average 90 to 100 crisis calls per month, Hope Center Executive Director Michelle Muething said, around 50 percent, or 45 calls per month, require an in-person response.

She said the Hope Center recorded a 79 percent reduction in transports to the hospital’s emergency department when they opened in 2010, since patients were seen on-scene by crisis counselors instead of requiring transport to access the care they needed.

Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione acknowledged that despite the crisis intervention training all officers go through, people experiencing a mental health crisis respond better to mental health professionals.

“Cops aren’t always the right people to go to someone in crisis,” he said. “The uniform, that presence — the whole thing just doesn’t always work out.”

Upon responding to a crisis call, clinicians — all of whom have a master’s level degree related to mental health, according to Severson — quickly build rapport with patients so that they can gather information to evaluate the best response to the situation.

“It is coming in non-judgmental, coming in with compassion, and really just listening, truly wanting to understand what the person is going through,” Severson said. “We don’t define the crisis. I want to understand what is happening to this person or what has happened to this person that has led us here to this moment. I’m not going to judge, I’m just going to listen to you.”

Once the crisis clinicians understand the situation, they create a safety plan. Often, the safety plan includes identifying people in the patient’s social network who could be supportive figures.

“It just really depends on what the evaluation yielded, and also what the collateral — such as family, friends, whoever knows this person the best — what they tell us,” Severson said. “We take that all into consideration to make the best outcome.”

The support provided has evidently had a positive impact, Muething said, since no one who has developed a safety plan with the Hope Center has died by suicide.

In conjunction with developing a safety plan, Severson said the Hope Center emphasizes following up with callers to ensure they are able to connect with support and resources.

“We’re really big on followup,” she said. “Since taking the supervisor role, that’s like my one thing — I want to make sure we always, always, always are following up with people.”

Through followups, Severson said, crisis counselors have learned that people are accessing the care they need more often than not. However, sometimes they find that people have not had the opportunity or time to connect with the suggested resources. 

In those cases, the counselors offer to reach out to the resource on their behalf.

“We want to make sure that people are putting in the effort for their own treatment,” Severson said. “But obviously, if someone works, 8 to 6 p.m., and they’re driving home, of course they’re not going to have the opportunity throughout the day to call and sit on the phone, maybe for 30 minutes or so, trying to get an appointment somewhere. So that’s where we step in, and we ask, ‘Is it going to be helpful and supportive for you for us to go ahead and make that connection?'”

In the Roaring Fork Valley, where stable housing is notoriously elusive, Severson said it can be a challenge to connect people with resources in a timely manner.

Though crisis clinicians do experience burnout, the most rewarding part of the job comes when they are able to help people find the resources they need, Severson said.

“It’s definitely a challenging job, but it’s also a very rewarding job,” she said. “It’s so rewarding when you get that phone call, or you do that followup in a month and they’re saying, ‘I’ve never been better. Thank you so much.'”

Buglione, who is a member of the Hope Center’s Advisory Board, emphasized the important role of the Hope Center and other mental health organizations in destigmatizing mental health.

“I think one of the biggest goals about mental illness as people who both do and don’t suffer from it, is to be able to take the stigma out of it and just be able to talk about it,” he said. “One of the goals of the Hope Center years ago was to just break that stigma of talking about mental illness and crisis.”

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