inRESPONSE Team

Santa Rosa’s inRESPONSE mental health crisis teams are filling an important need

The very first call for the services of the new inRESPONSE mental health mobile team, which hit the streets of Santa Rosa in January, was a success story. A woman at a local hospital had a mental health breakdown, and the team was dispatched to give assistance.

“We already knew this person in distress, because she was someone from Sam Jones Hall who had been pushed over the edge,” explains Jennielynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa, which runs the homeless shelter at 4020 Finley Ave. The woman was distraught, worrying about how she would get back to the shelter from the hospital, where she had a bed waiting for her. “The inRESPONSE team was able to de-escalate the situation at the hospital. It helped that the woman saw a familiar face on our team, so we were quickly able to get her the right level of care so that she didn’t return to the streets, and we got her safely back to the shelter.”