In Volusia County, 911 dispatchers are going through innovative emergency mental health training to help them better deal with both suicidal callers and their own mental health on the job. It's a training Sheriff Mike Chitwood says is needed more than ever after a worrying trends in mental health locally and across the country. 

Telecommunicator Supervisor James Oehmke has been answering 911 calls in Volusia county for the last 17 years. He is all too familiar with is suicidal callers. 

“It is a big problem here in this area to begin with,” said Oehmke. 

He can remember some he's encountered off the top of his head. 

“There was a lady who called up and said quickly on the line send somebody out here she hung up, tried calling back and she would not answer," Oehmke said. "When the units got on scene they found her, she shot herself in the head with a .357 Magnum."

He shared that those calls that are hard to forget, especially when panicking family members are on the line. 

“You feel some empathy with them, it makes very difficult to try and to focus because you’re thinking what if it was me that was in that kind of situation,” said Oehmke.

That is one of the reasons the VCSO is training its dispatchers with the emergency mental health training, arming them with best strategies for handling 911 callers who are at risk of suicide or other mental illness crisis. VCSO's Director of Communication James Soukup said all 135 of his dispatchers will go through this intense 3-day training with psychologist Jim Marshall.

“Most often when they call they don’t see any solutions but we can talk them through different things through the techniques that this course teaches us to have a better chance of having that positive outcome,” he said.

In the training they learn how to identify someone in crisis and determine what language to use and other tools to help them. Aside from that, they also learn how to care for their own mental health why dealing with these types of trying calls. 

“It also helped us keep us in mind what we need, how we need to prepare ourselves for these calls, what resources that are available for us if we need help after these calls,” said Oehmke.

Soukup said so far this year the department has received 51 attempted suicide calls already, which is a big concern for Chitwood. 

“In Central Florida, our numbers have always been high," Chitwood said. "The last couple years those numbers are starting to matriculate upwards and that is not a good thing for us."

According to Volusia County data, 128 people committed suicide in 2019, up from 80 people in 2009. With this training, Chitwood was confident his office can tackle this trend. 

“The linchpin to all of this is the communication folks, if they do their job and elicit all that information, the odds rise dramatically that we are going to have successful l conclusion to these incidents,” said Chitwood. 

The next round of training — which Chitwood said costs the county about $30,000 — will happen at the end of March.

He says their communication center is now nationally accredited — a standard less than 1% of communication centers in the country meet.

He believes this innovative training will help them keep that accreditation.

Source: Volusia County Department of Health