By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News

The Institute for Human Resources, better known as IHR, offers several services, including those for times of crisis.

Executive Director Joe Vaughan explains IHR’s crisis services and what happens when you reach out for help.

“People can get a hold of someone at IHR at any point. And what happens on the weekends or the evenings is you call our 844-6109 number. You get transferred to PATH. PATH takes some information. If they feel they need to page us, which they often do, they’ll page one of the crisis workers. We always have two crisis workers on at all times. So, one of those crisis workers will call the person back and then we start the assessment at that point. We can do assessments over the phone. Most of the time, we do our assessments at the ER, because we need to make sure the people are medically clear, we need to make sure there are no medical issue that’s causing some of the emotional issues they may be experiencing, and once we figure that out, we do a full assessment. We gather information, not only from the person, but their family and maybe other referral sources so we have a bigger picture of what’s going on. If a suicide happens, usually what we find is people get on social medial and they put on national suicide hotline number, which is perfectly fine, but we want people to know that we have somebody within the county who can handle those types of calls, hands on, and is strictly confidential, in terms of talking to someone who may have those type of thoughts,” Vaughan said.