CHICAGO — A woman called 911, worried her friend might commit suicide after seeing a concerning photo on social media and thinking she may have slit her wrist.
When a mental health response team arrived at the friend’s home on Chicago’s South Side last month as part of a new city effort, the team’s members were able to get the woman to talk to the team. The woman told them her daughter had died and her partner had left her.
“She didn’t want to die, but she had been trying to get help for so long, and different places that she called had given her the runaround,” said Gabrielle Mitchell, a mental health clinician with the response team, which now goes out on some Chicago 911 calls. “She really just wanted somebody to come and talk to her.”
