NAMI is also involved with award-winning local police trainers, the area ADAMHS Board, and other groups in holding week-long courses designed to train police officers from around Southeastern Ohio to recognize the mentally ill and take them for evaluation and treatment rather than to jail.

As of November 2006, five groups of officers have passed through these course and several hundred individuals have subsequently been diverted to receive evaluation and appropriate treatment. (Eighty five to 90 % of the individuals taken by CIT-trained police to receive psychiatric evaluation turn out to have a serious mental illness.)

Much of the funding for these programs has come from grants from the local, state, and national NAMI organizations and, in 2004, from a grant to NAMI Athens from the Athens Foundation.

Nov. 16, 2005 article
(reproduced with kind permission of The Athens Messenger)

More information on CIT projects at http://www.neoucom.edu/CJCCOE/cit.html