Clamping on headphones collectively, a room full of training participants was about to have a glimpse into a dark world Monday afternoon.

The sounds coming through the speakers were sometimes mysterious, sometimes downright lewd — the voices that speak in the heads of those who suffer from paranoid schizophrenia.

While listening to this relentless pulse of murmurs and insults, the group of some 40 people was asked to engage in a variety of tasks, ranging from the mundane to taking a reading comprehension test and trying to talk with an impatient psychiatrist.

Suzanne Muedini, one of the participants, came out unsure of how one with schizophrenia could survive.

“If that’s what they really sound like,” Muedini said of the electronic voices piped into her head, “I don’t know if I would be living.”

This simulation exercise was a component of a two-day crisis intervention partner training session, organized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, held Monday and today at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha.

Jack Rose, president of the Kenosha County chapter of the alliance, known as NAMI, said the training is geared toward social workers, corrections workers, nurses and other health professionals. It’s an abridged, civilian version of a five-day crisis intervention team curriculum that is available for law enforcement officers.

The objective is to better prepare professionals for situations where someone with a mental illness is in or near crisis. Participants are trained on how to identify, de-escalate and ultimately avoid a crisis, Rose said.

Brenda Wesley, education and outreach coordinator for NAMI of Greater Milwaukee, said statistics indicate a decline in injuries to mentally ill individuals and officers since the law enforcement training began.

“We’re trying to sensitize people to, I call it, ‘the mental illness thing,’ and what it entails,” said Wesley, who is open about her 31-year-old son’s struggles with schizophrenia.

‘Broken system’

State Rep. Sandy Pasch, D-Whitefish Bay, has a firsthand knowledge of what often happens to the mentally ill in crisis situations.

One of the presenters at Monday’s training session, Pasch is a former psychiatric nurse and assistant professor at the Columbia College of Nursing in Milwaukee. Elected to the Legislature in 2008, she is the sponsor of legislation that would boost the level of mental health coverage required of insurers.

Pasch said access to quality services remains elusive for many individuals suffering from mental illnesses.

With hospitals increasingly out of the psychiatric care business — it’s “not a good product line” for them, she said — Pasch said law enforcement officers often take the mentally ill to emergency rooms, where appropriate care is not available.

Pasch said the reverse can happen when an individual in crisis, perhaps contemplating suicide, checks himself into an emergency room, prompting hospital staff to call police.

In any case, the person in crisis often finds himself handcuffed in the back seat of a police squad car.

“The way the system has changed is we have given treatment of mental illness to the police departments,” Pasch said.

Pasch said knowledge about mental illness has come a long way since she was a nursing student in the 1970s, when “blaming the mom” was the prevailing notion in diagnosing illnesses.

“As far as we’ve come scientifically,” she added, “we’ve come not so far in providing treatment for people with mental illness.”

Training helpful

In addition to the schizophrenia simulation, this week’s training includes lectures, panel discussions and tours of the Kenosha Adult Residential Emergency Center and the Bridges Community Center. Rose said another two-day session is scheduled for June 14-15.

Muedini, a child protective services worker for the Kenosha County Division of Children and Family Services, said the training was very useful. Just last week, she said, she handled a case involving a child whose mother suffered from schizophrenia.

Essie Bennett, a long-term care specialist with the county Aging and Disability Resource Center, agreed.

“It kind of helps you have more sensitivity to what that person’s going through,” Bennett said.