Crisis - 2 x 45 minute sessions- Crisis Response: From Critique to Action - Brian Nuckols and panelists TBC
- Anti-Carceral Crisis Care: Cultivating Agency and Self-Determination for those Experiencing Altered States - Jessie Roth, Noah Gokul, Jazmine Russell
The presentation develops a critical theory of psychiatric crisis response, addressing three fundamental levels: theoretical foundations, methodological choices for intervention, and measurement, evaluation, and outcome research. This critical theory establishes a comprehensive framework to critically examine current practices in crisis response and proposes an interdisciplinary and community-based approach to theory, intervention, and measurement. At the theoretical level, the presentation integrates critical perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, theology, medicine, public health, and urban design, exploring the historical and socio-political contexts that shape current psychiatric crisis response systems. Methodologically, it advocates for approaches that have been ignored or erased by hegemonic psychiatric models, emphasizing creativity and experimental forms of narrative research to capture diverse experiences and perspectives on emotional crisis. For measurement and evaluation, the presentation proposes new metrics and evaluation criteria that reflect the complexity and holistic nature of psychiatric crises. A mixed-methods research approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods is suggested to provide a comprehensive evaluation, focusing on outcomes that are meaningful to service users and their communities. From this critical perspective the, the presentation proposes a swarm of movement-building interventions. The swarm, while ultimately uncontainable to any one objective, will stimulate itself through organizing an interdisciplinary consortium comprising service users, peers, and professionals from diverse fields such as art, psychotherapy, theology, medicine, sociology, anthropology, public health, and urban design. The consortium will collaboratively design, implement, and evaluate alternative community responses to emotional crises.
Anti-Carceral Crisis Care: Cultivating Agency and Self-Determination for those Experiencing Altered States. Jessie Roth, Noah Gokul, Jazmine RussellMental health services for those experiencing psychosis in the United States are largely rooted in coercion and control. Driven by individual provider fear and the system's emphasis on liability, mainstream responses often involve stripping people of their rights and agency. A common example is forced psychiatric commitment, which is expanding rapidly across the country as we speak. Not only are involuntary services an ineffective solution for people experiencing trauma and systemic oppression – research demonstrates that they actively perpetuate cycles of violence. They also disproportionately affect multiply marginalized community members, including the poor and unhoused, BIPOC, and disabled communities.
Lived experience wisdom can help challenge outdated assumptions about care for those experiencing psychosis and altered states, and has the potential to guide us into a more liberatory future. Unfortunately, this knowledge is often silenced in education, service delivery, and policy contexts. This session will weave together diverse lived experience perspectives on psychosis, such as firsthand experience with altered states, working in the system as a peer specialist, and witnessing psychiatric harm as a family member and trauma survivor. The presentation will be rooted in lineages of activism across movements that have birthed countless anti-carceral approaches to crisis care that cultivate agency and self-determination.
Through a brief presentation and interactive conversation with the audience, presenters will challenge dominant narratives that bolster coercive care approaches (e.g. people experiencing psychosis lack “insight” into their condition, also known as “anosognosia”), explore what becomes possible when crisis is redefined as an opportunity, and introduce a plethora of trauma-informed care approaches that exist within and outside the system. Participants will leave with new skills and strategies for “being with” and caring for those experiencing psychosis in ways that divest from the mental health industrial complex.
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