Helping law enforcement identify mentally ill subjects is the focus of a new training beginning today in Hinds County with a team of psychiatrists from University Medical Center in Jackson and specially trained members of the sheriff’s department.

Vicksburg and Warren County officers have received similar training, officials said.

In Jackson, the project is the result of Hinds County’s Crisis Intervention Team, a partnership of UMC, mental health agencies and the sheriff’s office, and will initially train nine deputies and three UMC security officers. Plans call for additional officer training every three to four months.

UMC psychiatrist and intervention team member Dr. Jon Corey Jackson said deputies Keith Roberts and Ian McMillin were trained in how to be trainers of other deputies by staff from the Crisis Intervention Team Center at the University of Memphis.

Jackson said they will join a team of psychiatrists from UMC to start the training. Each officer will receive 40 hours of training on how to approach and handle a subject and how to help him or her.

“There are a lot of factors that go into this training,” said Angela Ladner, executive director of the Mississippi Psychiatric Association and an intervention team member. “When a person is in crisis, you do not touch them. They may be seeing things, or having voices telling them to do things.”

In some cases, the person will be charged and jailed. Sometimes, the person will be taken to the UMC psychiatric emergency room.

Warren County deputies have received similar training in the past, offered by staff at Warren-Yazoo Mental Health center, said Sheriff Martin Pace.

“We also have the advantage here in Vicksburg of having a mental-health holding facility available to us, which is staffed by mental-health experts,” Pace said.

Very few such facilities exist in the state, said Pace. They allow for a person being held for mental evaluation to be security housed with trained staff instead of held in a jail cell or under guard in a hospital, Pace said.

Vicksburg police Captain Bobby Stewart said all of the department’s officers received training from WYMH within the past month. The training, which was provided free to the department, provided information on recognizing and dealing with mentally ill subjects, Stewart said.