We often think of first responders mainly as police, fire and emergency-medical professionals. In Las Vegas on Monday, NPR's Eric Westervelt found a small volunteer army of mental-health professionals, trauma counselors, psychiatrists and social workers who quickly fanned out to help some of the thousands who had witnessed the massacre up close.

Experts from across the valley have taken a hard look at both the city and state’s mental health care situation, and most agreed that, in order to fix things, it will take time, new professionals and lots of money. “Mental health funding draws from several fronts, and there is room for growth in all those fronts,” said Jim Jobin, president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “Nevada has the fewest clinicians of any state — that’s providers who can sit with you and know what to do. In Nevada, only one in three adults that has mental illness will be able to get help. Only one in two children who have severe mental illness can get any help. There’s not enough of us to go around.”

It’s well known that Nevada rarely tops lists when it comes to accessibility of mental health services. The Silver State ranked 50th among U.S. states in 2013 for number of psychiatrists per capita and routinely falls at the bottom of Mental Health America’s overall ranking of access to care.