Mental health crisis intervention involves a team-led effort to help someone severely mentally ill. Interventions occur in various settings, and experts aim to calm the situation and determine the best treatment. The intervention team may consist of therapists, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychiatric nurses. The goal is to reduce the impact of the crisis and refer people to resources that will address underlying issues.
Mental health crisis intervention is conducted in a number of ways and is often a team-led effort to help someone who has become severely mentally ill, whether due to trauma or underlying, untreated mental disorders. Interventions occur over the telephone, in hospitals, prisons, psychiatric emergency facilities or psychiatric hospitals, or in public, if a person is behaving erratically and posing a risk to themselves or others. These interventions are brief, with the goal of helping the person become calmer and assess the situation to determine the risk at hand. Additional evaluation can determine the most beneficial forms of treatment.
The term “intervention” makes most people think of family and friend-based interventions led by a therapist or interventionist to get someone to receive medical treatment for conditions such as addiction. It is possible to stage a mental health crisis intervention of this kind, but this is not the usual meaning of the term. Rather, experts in dealing with mental health issues come from outside the family, and confrontational attitudes could be harmful, especially with large numbers of people present. Additionally, a mentally ill person may lack the ability to understand or cope with a large group of family members pleading for the person for assistance. When experts intervene, they do so first to calm and calm the situation, instead of making the sick person feel attacked or guilty, which could exacerbate the problem.
A mental health intervention team may consist of several experts. These could include therapists, social workers, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses. The most dangerous situations occur when a mentally ill person is threatening or has the real means to hurt themselves or others, and law enforcement agencies can handle these scenarios more frequently. Many law enforcement professionals are trained to recognize the signs of illness and use different tactics to try to elicit cooperation from the mentally ill and calm reactions. They are not always successful, and unfortunate incidents often occur where people are so sick that they are unable to listen to police instructions and are injured or killed.
The hope is that a mental health crisis intervention will occur much earlier than this point, as a result of simply contacting people with local community resources, such as hospitals or psychiatric emergency centers, for help. In less life-threatening settings, an expert team determines the degree of suicidality or danger they pose to others by individuals in crisis. They can also assess the likelihood that a person in crisis can follow through on a contract, be safe at home or with others, and follow through to get needed assistance.
Crisis intervention should be understood as short-term, possibly consisting of one, three or four meetings with the person in crisis. It is intended to bridge a gap until more lasting resources can be obtained, such as getting a therapist or perhaps pursuing hospitalization. In most cases, the goal of mental health crisis intervention is to help people with immediate needs, reduce the impact of the crisis, and refer people to resources that will address the underlying issues of the crisis.
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