What do I mean by a mental health crisis? It’s a situation where someone’s distress becomes too overwhelming to manage on their own. They require immediate support. What happens next can shape whether they feel supported and connected to care or pushed further away from it. There are other definitions of mental health crisis but that’s what I will mean in this series of blogs.
The central role of police in mental health crisis response has become an area of growing public debate. Many people who have experienced police-led crisis intervention describe it as feeling disconnected from the care and support they were seeking during moments of distress. The presence of police alone can escalate crisis situations. Police officers themselves have described feeling underprepared when responding to crisis situations. Across much of Canada and the United States, that immediate support, known as mental health crisis response, often comes in the form of police involvement. This is the case even when police involvement may not be wanted or needed. Police are the default responders to mental health crisis situations. As a result, for many people, these encounters with police become one of the first points of contact with the broader mental healthcare system.
So, if police-led crisis response is not meeting everyone’s needs, what other intervention options are possible?
Questions like this have led many communities to rethink what crisis mental health response should look like and whether police should be involved at all. They suggest ways to reorganize crisis intervention by reducing reliance on police and expanding other forms of support for people experiencing acute distress. Some models work alongside police (i.e., co-responder teams) and others offer crisis response without police involvement altogether (i.e., civilian or peer-led teams).
My research sits within these changing conversations about crisis response and the broader ideas that shape how crisis intervention is understood. Broadly, I am interested in three connected questions:
- How police came to play such a central role in crisis mental health response, and why they continue to be treated as necessary despite evidence challenging this belief;
- How communities are beginning to build alternative approaches to crisis care; and
- How assumptions about safety and risk influence the ways people in crisis are understood and responded to, including who is seen as needing care, who is seen as dangerous, and what kinds of intervention become possible.
Throughout this blog series, I will explore these questions. I will move from broad discussions about crisis response systems to more specific conversations about policing, widely accepted ideas about distress and mental health and the growing efforts to rethink what crisis care can look like. My goal is to introduce the different crisis response models that exist. But I also want to ask deeper questions about care, risk, safety and how each shapes the ways people in crisis are understood and responded to. Ultimately, I want to use this blog series to highlight the efforts of communities who are imagining non-police led responses that better support people in moments of crisis.
