Report cites lack of teen mental health resources

REDWOOD CITY — San Mateo County needs to refine its process for dealing with teens during psychiatric emergencies, according to a report released this past week.

The county’s civil grand jury issued the report titled “Teens in Mental Health Crisis: From 911 to the Emergency Room Door,” which found that the county’s “lights and sirens” response leads individuals, schools and other public agencies to be “often reluctant to use the 911 dispatch system because of the detrimental effects on adolescents when firstresponders arrive on the scene with lights and sirens activated.”

One of the grand jury’s findings was that the San Mateo County Mental Assessment and Referral Team’s (SMART) car program, which approaches psychiatric emergencies in a discreet manner and was launched in 2005, was available to respond only 28 percent of the time in 2015.

Reasons it found for the low percentage include vehicles undergoing repairs, personnel absent or reassigned, vehicles responding to other calls, or calls coming in after hours.

The county since April 2014 has had two SMART cars, which are SUV-type vehicles with tinted windows but without lights or sirens, each of which is staffed by “two specially trained emergency medical staff” who can treat the patients in the vehicle or transport them to a hospital.

The SMART program assists youths and adults, and it is fully funded by the county, meaning it is free of charge to patients.

When psychiatric emergency calls come to the 911 dispatch center that serves East Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Millbrae, San Carlos, Portola Valley, Woodside and unincorporated areas of the county, dispatchers can send only police and/or fire and ambulance vehicles to the scene, according to the report.

Dispatch centers serving other areas might or might not send a SMART car.

“There is a stigma to riding in the back of a police car,” according to an unnamed school official quoted in the report.