Center helps mentally ill in crisis

Until now, people in Milwaukee County who suffered a mental health crisis, especially after-hours, often ended up in one of three places: a hospital emergency room, the county’s psychiatric hospital, or jail. And often they didn’t belong in any of them.

That changed this month with the opening of the Crisis Resource Center on Milwaukee’s south side, a round-the-clock program aimed at stabilizing patients and then connecting them with services in the community they need to guide their own recovery.

A collaboration of a dozen or so organizations that serve people with mental illness, the center is thought to be the first of its kind nationally to pair nurses and peer support specialists - individuals working through their own recovery - to address not just the crisis at hand but the myriad other problems that might bring a person to the center’s doors.