Envisioning a grassroots framework for community-based mental health crisis intervention

The mental health and well-being of both individuals and communities are going to be best served by community-based services and care completely unreliant on traditional top-down models that often include inaccessible services and/or coercive methods. This is especially prevalent in the case of mental health crisis intervention; where most state-based interventions involve coercive agents who often are not given any specific training on mental health crisis response. As mental health crisis and suicide rates continue to rise in the U.S., and even the most well-respected model of crisis intervention has done little to resolve the issues of prisons serving as short-term mental institutions, we must turn away from the State and towards theories of community organization and radical justice. By exploring the conclusions of these theories and the impact of groups that have attempted new models of community-based mental health support and crisis intervention, we can envision something new, something that might one day serve as the framework for future models of care