Mental health care is health care and police are not trained to provide it any more than they’re trained to provide care for any other medical condition. Consequently, Toronto’s plan to implement the Community Crisis Support Service pilot program, announced last week, is welcome news. When people slip through the cracks of our broken mental health care system, they fall right to the police. And on occasions when a person descends into crisis, the crisis teams would be there to catch them. Even a uniform — police or otherwise — can trigger a traumatic memory, which is both exacerbated by, and exacerbates, a mental health crisis.

Source: thestar January 24, 2022 18:08 UTC