Waiting for Help: A family’s plea to Deschutes County’s Crisis Team after what they believe was too slow a response

(Update: Adding video, details from family friend, county representative)

BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- A local family says it recently took Deschutes County's Community Crisis Response Team nearly two hours to help their son in mental health crisis, causing Bend High to lock their doors.

Erica Clark, who is close to the man and witnessed the crisis two weeks ago, spoke with us about what happened.

"The brain is just as fragile as a broken leg," she said, "and just having that awareness of like, 'We're going to meet this person where they're at, we're going to stay calm' -- which they did stay calm in the situation. I think that if the Deschutes County Crisis Team had been able to show up sooner, we could have avoided all of this. "

According to his mother, a 22-year-old man was experiencing psychosis on the south side of Bend when police and the CCRT were called for help.

But the situation escalated once officers arrived on the scene.

"They went in, handled the situation, and this person was in serious psychosis, like to the point where they were afraid, not understanding what's happening, very agitated, frustrated," Clark said. "So they put him in handcuffs. And then the family and I stood back to gauge what was going on, trying to defuse the situation."

In a statement to NewsChannel 21, the mother said a continued poor response by mental health services would cause more harm than good, like what happened with her son.

"As the mom, I was terrified that without mental health services, my son and or someone else was going to end up hurt," she said. "The lack of a quick response from Mental Health could have been avoided. These experiences add repeated trauma to what already is a difficult illness to treat."

This story is just one example of numerous we were told by people in the community. But each story had one concern in common: response time. 

Crisis Team Supervisor Nicole Von Laven said, "From February 1st through February 16th, I think is the cutoff date that I picked, because it seemed like most of our entries were in, our average time between dispatch and arrival was 27.3 minutes.

In this case, a county official said Friday, the response team was 28 minutes -- not nearly two hours, as the family said.

"It does depend on a variety of factors. We've been hit with a lot of snow in February, so weather can be one of those factors," Von Laven added.

She says no call is the same, and response times can vary, based on the nature of the situation. If police believe the environment would become more aggressive with team members there, the team will be called off.

The teams of two or three usually cost about $2 million a year, and last year, over 1,000 calls were answered, Von Laven said,

"That's ultimately our whole goal of expanding crisis services is, how can we connect people to the services they're actually needing, and the right level of care for whatever is going on for them, without having to send them to the hospital, or having them end up in jail as a result of their crisis?"

The patient is currently being treated at St. Charles Bend for his psychosis, and it's unknown when he will be released.

More information: https://www.deschutes.org/health/page/crisis-services