Critiques of medicalized approaches to mental health emergencies involving law enforcement are widespread, yet alternative, community-based interventions are limited in practice.
A new article, published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, uses qualitative research interviews to offer insight from the ground up, examining how a small but growing number of organizers and health professionals are building radically different approaches to emergency care.
The authors, Jenny Logan of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (and Mad in America) and Gianna D’Ambrozio of the University of Massachusetts Boston, identify shared commitments and common obstacles among those working to transform mental health crisis response:
“Dominant approaches to mental health crises in the United States are coercive and cause harm. These approaches are informed by a medicalized model of mental health that regards an individual’s agency as subordinate to their need for treatment. Medicalized approaches may lead to forced psychopharmacological treatment whose evidence base is compromised by industry-academic relation- ships. This has led to over-estimation of the benefits and underestimation of the harm of psychotropic medications, which undermines the informed consent process.”
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