Psych Crisis

We’re creating a world where anybody who goes through a mental, emotional, or spiritual crisis gets help that:

• Helps them integrate, recover, and move on to a meaningful, flourishing life – for them!
• Is respectful and trustworthy – to them.
• Is fast and easy to access – for them.

In other words, we think full recovery from mental health crises is personal, interactive, and works best when a person feels really safe. So that’s what we’re making possible. 

Currently, anyone who uses the existing psychiatric crisis system faces:

• A limited set of brief, medical-model-based treatment options and monotonous hospital environments, most of which suppress symptoms of distress rather than resolving the causes of distress (for most people).
• A high risk of being taken to hospital against their will and detained for weeks, even if it is isn’t unlikely to help
• Communication from clinical authorities that is hard to trust and make sense of. 
• Clinical teams that are uncertain of their impact on recovery because their financial and professional incentives do not encourage tracking this information accurately.
• Long waits and complicated processes (that depend on their financial situation)

1. We’re establishing a new kind of mobile crisis team (starting in a twin-county system in Northern California), seeded from a team with a respectful culture that has operated in a town in Oregon for 30 years. We’re changing our incentives, and tracking our outcomes. Follow our progress, or work with us. 
2. We’re hosting scientific dialogue between researchers who are working to move beyond the biomedical model of psychiatric problems to one that works better for patients and clinicians seeking relief and recovery. Sign up to read our publications when they are ready. 
3. We’re publishing analyses of issues in the current system, and interviews with people who have changed it. Listen to our podcast, or read our writing.

• The Lived Expertise Project– collected case studies of recovery from crisis by interviewing people who have been through it and are now flourishing
• NDM Training Day– applied a niche training methodology developed for complex, evolving situations in the military to train mental health crisis response teams in the SF Bay Area
• Case studies on existing alternatives to modern mainstream crisis care
• Served on the California Behavioral Health Planning Council, an advisory body to the California Department of Healthcare Services
• Consulted as a family member on how to reduce the rate at which people escape from emergency departments in the Illawarra-Shoalhaven hospital system in New South Wales, Australia
• Received a grant from the Emergent Ventures program to establish this new organisation