City’s Mental Health Coordinator Checks In

City Hall’s first-ever ​“community mental health” coordinator is five months into her job — and focused on building peer-to-peer emotional support systems amid a shortage in formal clinical services.

Lorena Mitchell, a social worker who formerly worked at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Haven, stepped into the new City Hall role this past summer. 

The Independent recently caught up with her to talk about the new Elicker Administration job, and about her goals and plans for helping New Haveners at a time of widespread, pandemic-exacerbated mental health struggles.

The Coordinator for Community Mental Health Initiatives is one of four new positions within the Department of Community Resilience that the city created using federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding.

As a social worker in the VA emergency room, where she worked for three years, Mitchell attended to the urgent needs of psychiatric patients at their most vulnerable moments. 

“The VA is an amazing healthcare system, but in many ways, I felt the inadequacies of our mental healthcare system writ large,” Mitchell said during a recent interview with this reporter. ​“In the emergency room, you’re helping somebody on their worst day, and you’re doing what you can to soothe a crisis. But that crisis that you’re seeing is related to so much else that you don’t really get to see in the emergency room, whether it’s housing instability, or difficulties in the employment realm, or relationships, whatever else it is.”

Now, she has an opportunity to address the systemic failures she witnessed first-hand and focus on the root causes of psychiatric challenges. 

Mitchell said her focus so far has been building emotional support services into non-clinical settings. 

“We know that there’s a shortage of the formal mental healthcare providers,” she said. ​“The reality is that not everyone can access a one-on-one therapist, and that’s not what everyone is looking for. And that’s why we’re thinking a lot about how can we promote mental health in other community settings.”

So far, Mitchell has been working to expand support systems at the city’s homelessness navigation hubs, such as the Community Action Agency of Greater New Haven and Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK)‘s drop-in center on State Street, by partnering with Advocacy Unlimited’s Bridger Program, a statewide peer support network for people with psychiatric conditions including substance use disorder. 

Evan Serio, a program manager at DESK, said that through a partnership with Advocacy Unlimited that Mitchell facilitated, DESK is preparing to host a support group for individuals who hear voices that others do not. 

“There is no set schedule or topic, and there is no mandate to speak in a particular way,” Serio said. ​“It’s there to be a safe and accepting space for people who hear voices, see things, know things, or experience other phenomena that the Western medical world believes to be ​‘not normal.’”

“The transformative part of this is that it’s peer-led,” Serio added, noting that unhoused clients at DESK have been advocating for peer-to-peer support models. ​“It’s not just an ​‘us-and-them, we are the service providers, we are the experts, and they are the clients’ ” type of model, he said. ​“It’s foregrounding lived experience and lived expertise, which is well deserved and long overdue.”

“It’s been absolutely great to have such strong municipal partners,” Serio said.

In addition, Mitchell has been running free mental health trainings, including Mental Health First Aid, QPR Institute’s Suicide Prevention training, and an original curriculum about fostering dialogue around mental health. So far, she’s trained about 50 people, primarily in workplace settings, she said — including at soup kitchens, libraries, churches, senior centers, and prison re-entry centers. The trainings focus on identifying signs of a mental health crisis and appropriately intervening.

“We really want to make all of those places responsive to people’s mental health needs: trauma-informed spaces,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell is also helping to coordinate several other nonprofit collaborations, including: 

• A Liberty Community Services case manager devoted to the library system.

• The Community Healing Support Team run by Clifford Beers. The Healing Support Team responds to community members in the wake of tragedies, within 48 hours of a call. The team provides counseling as well as other basic needs, ​“whether people need to clean up their apartment after a violent situation or are having trouble getting meals together,” Mitchell said.

• The city’s COMPASS crisis response team, which dispatches social workers and peer counselors to certain mental health, substance use, or homelessness-related 911 calls. Mitchell’s role is to ​“convene all parts of that system and make sure that the COMPASS team is integrated,” organizing meetings with everyone involved and troubleshooting any hiccups, she said.

She hopes to bolster data collection about New Haveners’ mental health, expanding beyond a reliance on emergency room and hospitalization statistics to encompass a broader sense of the city’s well-being in non-crisis situations. 

That could mean integrating data from local nonprofits, 211 calls, and surveys, added Department of Community Reslience Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo.

Finally, Mitchell said, she’s met with 50 service providers and community groups to learn more about ​“how communities are experiencing mental health challenges and what healing looks like” to various pockets of the city. 

These conversations have reinforced her belief that social conditions are inextricably linked to emotional well-being — especially the affordable housing crisis, which she named as the most pressing threat to community mental health at the moment.

Mitchell’s role is separate from the city’s school system, but the particular mental health challenges facing kids and teens remain on her mind. ​“While we don’t have any programs right now that are specifically targeted towards young people or people in school, we really believe that we’re supporting the whole system,” she said.

So far, through her trainings and meetings with community members, Mitchell has observed that ​“people are so hungry to have these conversations” about often-stigmatized topics like self-harm. She often hears questions from people concerned about loved ones, wondering about signs of suicidality. ​“I think we’re at a place right now where people really want to talk about mental health.”

If you are struggling with self-harm, you are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800−273−8255; it operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The crisis text line is 741741.