If you are experiencing a psychiatric emergency, call 9-8-8.
EMERGENCY SERVICES
NRVCS Emergency Services provides emergency evaluation and crisis intervention to the New River Valley 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Emergency Services at NRVCS are key to the safety net of care for those individuals in our local community who are struggling with mental illness and substance use disorders. We are able to provide clinical assessment and referral to a variety of services upon request.
By Virginia Code, it is a primary responsibility of Emergency Services to provide evaluations under the civil commitment process for those individuals who are in need of immediate inpatient psychiatric treatment and are either unwilling to seek this treatment or unable to consent to this treatment. Immediate assessment and intervention services are initiated by referrals from a number of community partners and are provided in a variety of settings including: medical hospitals, schools, law enforcement offices, and nursing and adult homes.
RAFT CRISIS HOTLINE
The Raft Crisis Hotline is a program that offers free paraprofessional phone counseling services to the community.
Raft volunteers provide crisis intervention, empathy and support, mental health and substance abuse information and referrals to the counties of Montgomery, Floyd, Giles, Pulaski and the City of Radford (including Virginia Tech and Radford University).
Raft is the only volunteer crisis hotline in Virginia affiliated with and located within a community service board, New River Valley Community Services (NRVCS). This provides Raft callers with continual access to professionals and trained volunteers, phone counseling, information and referrals—services not available through other CSBs. Learn more
CRISIS INTERVENTION TEAM (CIT)
The New River Valley Crisis Intervention Team (NRVCIT) is a successful program for improving police interactions with persons with mental illness. It is a pre-booking jail diversion program developed to prevent the inappropriate incarceration of individuals with mental illness and provide an alternative outcome which addresses both public safety and therapeutic concerns.
The key components of any CIT program are training of law enforcement officers to recognize and intervene with individuals suffering from mental illness through the use of basic crisis intervention and verbal de-escalation strategies and an assessment center that allows for the transfer of custody of individuals held on an emergency custody order.
As the first CIT program in Virginia and the first rural, multijurisdictional CIT program in the nation, NRVCIT has trained more than 250 local law enforcement officers and an additional 154 officers from across Virginia and the ranks of Virginia State Police.