Developing and Sustaining Mental Health Crisis Intervention Skills

Local law enforcement officers are often first on the scene for mental health crises and situations that traditionally call for a trained social worker or mental health professional. Crisis intervention team (CIT)training programs using a police training simulator can be helpful. Crisis intervention simulation helps your team recognize escalation points and manage triggers effectively, leading to better interactions even in high-stress situations.

Law enforcement agencies know the criminal justice system is one of the most expensive (and ineffective) ways to address many problems a community member in crisis can create. In Detroit, for instance, jailing someone costs more than three times more than providing them with resources for coping with mental illness. Many individuals with substance and mental health disorders can be helped with cost-effective community-based treatment instead. CIT programs connect law enforcement, mental health providers, hospital emergency services, individuals in distress, their families, and other stakeholders around a shared goal of community and individual safety. Through partnerships among community organizations and advanced training in crisis scenarios, police officers and social workers can improve communication, identify mental health resources for those in crisis, and ensure officer and community safety.

Communication is the key to crisis management. But communication is often complicated—even more so when mental health and other factors come into play. As much as 70 percent of all communication is non-verbal. Non-verbal communication is especially critical when interacting with individuals under stress involving mental health — times when verbal communication is often confused, confusing, or absent altogether. Officers and first responders must quickly and correctly distinguish pre-event indicators from signs of distress or agitation not indicative of impending violence. Developing and practicing a CIT skillset with realistic scenarios helps.

MILO Crisis Intervention Training from a social worker's point of view

MILO Crisis Intervention Training Overview

MILO Simulation - A Compliment to CIT Training

MILO Crisis Intervention Training for Law Enforcement

Simulation-Based Crisis Intervention Training

When law enforcement officers use CIT techniques, they increase their likelihood of properly reading and responding to verbal and non-verbal indicators. Understanding those behavioral cues is especially vital to officers when dealing with a person experiencing a mental health crisis.

MILO’s immersive solutions provide every police officer with a safe place to practice what is taught in the CIT program, which prioritizes effective mental health interaction and response. Trainees can build and hone their de-escalation and communication skills while responding with compassion and respect. There is no better way to test your team’s response to an actual crisis than in a training simulator.

Our police and co-response training solutions offer a collection of sensory-rich training scenarios that are optimized to elicit real and vivid emotive responses in your trainees. Your training instructors then harness these responses to guide your teams toward creating the outcomes that best reflect your community values and departmental standards. Whether training brand-new recruits, seasoned officers, or co-response teams, the MILO training system provides the best preparation for practicing crisis response.

MILO’s branching scenarios are flexible, allowing instructors to escalate, de-escalate, and reproduce situations in real-time. Police officers and social workers can work through the same CIT scenario repeatedly, honing their emotional intelligence and soft skills when engaging with individuals in crisis. If a trainee’s response escalates the situation, they have the opportunity to course-correct, adjust their approach, and work toward de-escalation—all within a safe training environment.

MILO simulation-based mental health scenarios are designed and filmed in consultation with active law enforcement, mental health experts, and clinicians. They feature diverse actors and situations that reflect the realities of your communities.

Benefits of a Crisis Intervention Training Simulator

Cost-Effective: Simulation-based training reduces costs by eliminating the need for real-life role players, reducing overtime expenses, and eliminating venue and travel expenses for training.

Safe Training Environment: The MILO training environment fosters a growth mindset by offering a psychologically safe space for participants to ask questions, make mistakes, and refine their approaches.

Continual Skill Development: MILO simulation helps students continuously practice and refine decision-making, de-escalation, and communication skills for real-world crises.

A Place to Practice What you Learned in CIT Training

The real value of MILO’s immersive crisis intervention training solution is having a psychologically safe place to further develop what is learned in CIT training in a controlled environment.

These simulated scenarios are optimized to create opportunities for officers to practice their de-escalation skills in true-to-life situations, with all the complexity, nuance, and emotional pressures these bring. Scenarios range from those in crisis to those under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

MILO simulators are instructor-controlled, with full audio/video capture and debriefing tools. Based on the trainee’s responses and actions, scenarios can be more intense, challenging, escalated, and de-escalated during the simulation exercise.

The trainee-centered after-action debriefing process proactively involves the trainee in extracting valuable insights from each of their crisis intervention sessions, maximizing the potential for learning and growth. By reviewing their performance on camera and assessing their decisions, trainees gain a deeper understanding of their actions and enhance their skills significantly.

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CIT Simulation Training Solution

We invest time in understanding your needs and policies upfront, then work closely with your team to deliver the appropriate crisis intervention team training solution. We’ll help you find the best way to integrate this custom solution into your training procedures and support you in maintaining and evolving this solution as your policies, challenges, and communities inevitably change over time.

We don’t just sell equipment; we partner with agencies and their instructors to develop their ideal CIT training solutions.