Community-Based Mental Health Crisis Services

When people experience a mental health crisis (e.g., has suicidal thoughts, symptoms of psychosis, or relapse of substance use), they often seek assistance from mental health crisis services. Psychiatric Services has published several seminal studies regarding crisis services, as highlighted in this month’s Editor’s Choice.

The first three articles in this collection detail how crisis services have been prioritized by state and federal policy makers as a response to system pressures such as emergency department boarding of psychiatric patients and limited psychiatric inpatient bed capacity. Subsequent articles are organized by service models described in the 2016 National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention’s Crisis Services Task Force report, “Crisis Now: Transforming Services is Within Our Reach.” In a comprehensive crisis system, community-based services can be utilized as a continuum of care; whereas some crises will resolve with a phone call to a crisis call center, others will require mobile crisis team dispatch, and a minority will require further escalation to a crisis facility with services such as 23-hour observation, short-term respite, or longer-term crisis residential services. Access to these services relies on collaboration with law enforcement through models such as the crisis intervention team, which are described in the last section of the collection.