Her accomplishments so far – Amistadi assisted 53 residents during the first three months of the pilot and regularly advises Shaker’s emergency personnel on other calls – have the City’s leaders already seeking to renew the program for 2023. And MetroHealth is hoping to use the pilot as a stepping stone for similar partnerships across Northeast Ohio. “Annette has been the right person,” says Fire Chief Patrick Sweeney. “She has taken a strong lead on this and is starting to make an impact on the community.” “With Annette on the scene,” adds Shaker Police Chief Jeffrey DeMuth, “we now have someone who will follow up with those people. She is a tremendous resource to the police officers and firefighters.” WWW.SHAKER.LIFE | SUMMER 2022 55 Although MetroHealth was still looking for a full-time employee for the pilot at the time of publication, Amistadi, who directs case managers at Recovery Resources, will eventually oversee her successor in Shaker. Since January she has spent two days a week onsite, and has also led hour-long video calls with the City’s emergency responders three times a week. Like most communities across the country, Shaker has struggled to handle the impact of the nation’s growing mental health and addiction epidemics. The COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. In 2019, before COVID-19, the Shaker Police Department estimates it received 470 emergency calls related to mental illness. While that’s a small percentage of the more than 37,000 calls that year, Sweeney and DeMuth believe those numbers are increasing. Both chiefs remember responding to those types of calls early in their own Shaker careers during the late 1980s. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the years. For police officers, medics, and firefighters, often the best they can do is transport a mentally ill person in distress to a local emergency room. “We want to do the best for that resident,” says Sweeney. “We want to get them the care that they really need. The emergency room isn’t always the right place. I think we’re realizing there’s more of a need out there than we originally thought.” Others were seeing the same issues. After events such as the murder of George Floyd sparked renewed scrutiny of police conduct, Shaker City Council members Tres Roeder and Anne Williams put together a task force to brainstorm how emergency responders could better help those with mental health problems. “People close to me have been impacted by mental health,” says Roeder. “And I’ve heard many in the community share stories of how they have personally been impacted by mental health. Obviously, outcomes are better when proper treatment is received.” The task force included DeMuth and Sweeney as well as community members like Roslyn English, a long-time Shaker resident who has struggled with her 35-year-old son’s schizophrenia for years. Mental illness in a loved one can be “a roller coaster,” English says. But it has also pushed her to help “bring mental illness out of the shadows” by working with family support groups and advisory committees like the Shaker task force. And although she and her son have had good experiences with Shaker police, as the mother of a mentally ill Black man, English worries that might not always be the case for everyone. “We wanted to maximize the potential for positive outcomes for my son and for other people dealing with mental health challenges,” English says. “It’s not necessarily the police who have to deal with this.” The task force looked at the community’s needs and studied mental health programs around the country, from the modest to the ambitious, including a successful, multi-million-dollar crisis intervention system in Eugene, Oregon. In the end, task force members came up with a solution that they believed fit Shaker, and City Council unanimously approved $100,000 for the pilot. Shaker now needed to find the right partner. MetroHealth jumped at the chance. What’s Best for Residents
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