When the Arlington Police Department received new doses of the powerful overdose antidote Narcan, Clinical Responder Rebecca Wolfe started calling everyone who’d overdosed in town, asking if they or their friends were still using. When one young man who overdosed last June didn’t return her call, she headed over to his house.
He agreed to go to treatment, and nine months later he called her back, saying he had stayed clean the whole time. Now, he’s living in a half-way house in New Hampshire with other men from detox programs, all because Wolfe took him by surprise and showed up at his house.
Only the second person to ever win the award from the state Department of Mental Health for clinical collaboration with law enforcement, Wolfe was completely surprised by her win. Her work in mental health extends before her time in Arlington. Wolfe has been doing crisis work since 1992, predominantly in emergency rooms, and in 2010 she became the supervisor at Advocates Crisis Team in Waltham.
“Coming in, nobody wanted it, they thought I would be in their business or a spy and that didn’t turn out to be the case at all,” said Wolfe. “Now it’s six and a half years later, we’ve done a lot of great work in the community and I think we learn from each other every day.”
The day to day
As a clinical responder, Wolfe works with officers on their cases where her skills as a masters level clinician are needed. These include cases related to mental health, substance use and abuse or even domestic violence where the situation needs to be deescalated. Another aspect of Wolfe’s job is writing up Section 12A reports, or a Pink Paper, that allows officials to take someone to the hospital who may or may not voluntarily go for an evaluation.
″[Another] big part of this job is getting people out of their silos, out of their own departments and working together, bringing everybody to the table and having centralized intakes for things like hoarding or senior abuse prevention,” said Wolfe. She worked with Health and Human Services to create a Hoarding Response Team, which helped the woman featured on the television show Hoarders: Buried Alive. Wolfe’s most recent project has been the opiate program.
History of Clinical Responders
Police departments who don’t use the coresponding method of clinical responders use Crisis Intervention Training (CIT). With CIT, specific officers from the department go through a 40-hour training course where officers learn to manage the same crisis situations Wolfe deals with on a day-to-day basis.
“I see people when they’re at their worst,” said Wolfe. “Either they’ve overdosed or they’ve had a psychiatric crisis and we’re not remembered. As long as I get them where they need to go, that’s what’s important.”