A family’s experience navigating crisis response from 2020 to 2026
Serious mental illness is a medical illness.
It is not a moral failure.
It is not bad parenting.
It is not a character flaw.
Serious mental illness includes conditions such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder with psychosis, and other disorders that affect how the brain processes reality, regulates mood, and organizes thought. These illnesses disrupt sleep, perception, judgment, and the ability to function in everyday life. They are recognized medical conditions that require treatment, stabilization, and ongoing care just like any other illness affecting the body.
When serious mental illness escalates into psychosis, it becomes a medical crisis. The brain is not functioning normally. Judgment is impaired. Sleep disappears. Perception becomes distorted. The person experiencing it often cannot recognize what is happening to them.
This is not a situation that improves with time or distance.
It requires immediate medical intervention.
In February of 2021, Mobile Crisis Response was implemented in Mendocino County. The idea was straightforward. When someone is experiencing a psychiatric emergency, trained mental health professionals would respond instead of relying solely on law enforcement. The goal was earlier intervention, stabilization, and a more appropriate response to mental illness in the community.
On paper they sure made it sound like progress.
Before Mobile Crisis existed, the response to psychiatric crises was simple. Families were told to call the crisis line. The crisis line did not come out into the community to evaluate someone. If the person would not voluntarily go to the hospital, the next step was to call law enforcement.
But when I called law enforcement, I was told something else. My son had not committed a crime. I needed to call the crisis line.
So the response became a literal ping pong match and I was the bouncy ball.
The crisis line would tell me to call the police.
The police would tell me to call the crisis line.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Meanwhile the person in crisis experiencing psychosis continued to deteriorate.
These crises are medical emergencies.
There is one difference between my experience in 2020 and my experience today. Back then I knew almost nothing about how the crisis system worked. I was thrown into it overnight against my will while my son was in the middle of psychosis. No one asks for this. This is hellish.
Today I understand much more about how these systems operate. It has not been easy. Often it has been mind boggling and painful. But my continued hope is to change response and outcomes.
But my gained knowledge did not come from the system helping families like mine understand it. It came from years of my own research, persistence, and determination so I could better support my son and my community.
Unfortunately, after a four year reprieve, we found ourselves navigating another psychiatric crisis.
Thank goodness I recognized the early warning signs. Mania beginning. Sleep disappearing. Behavior becoming erratic.
I began making calls early.
My goal was mitigation and intervention.
This time, in my hopefulness and perhaps even a bit of naivety, I believed things might be different.
Sad to say, they simply are not.
There were new programs.
Mobile Crisis teams.
New funding.
New legislation expanding the definition of grave disability.
But the experience of trying to get help was truly the same.
The same barriers still exist.
However instead of the old ping pong between agencies, there is now a triage process. Multiple calls. Multiple workers asking questions while I was asked to explain what was happening.
But the questions asked of me were often simply: “What is he doing right now?”
Which meant I was left describing behaviors while trying to explain that someone was deteriorating and needed help. In my opinion when someone is in crisis questions should focus on specific behaviors that indicate psychiatric instability.
At one point I remember thinking: What the heck?, am I being gaslighted.
Am I the crisis worker?
He was in crisis.
I was in crisis.
And somehow I was the one being asked to assess the situation.
And at several points the crisis workers told me they would have to check with a supervisor before deciding what could be done.
The structure has changed.
The outcome has not.
Intervention still waits for a threshold that is unclear and hard to understand.
Only when a crisis becomes visible to responders does the system finally move forward.
The system does not take family experience and knowledge as a pathway to intervention.
I felt my conversations with law enforcement were much more in depth, kind and beneficial.
Crazy I know.
This is not about blaming individual workers. Most people inside the system are trying to do their jobs within the rules they are given.
The problem is structural.
When the response system waits for the public breakdown before intervening it guarantees the crisis will escalate farther and in the process causes more harm.
Families see the deterioration and the trajectory long before the system will act. The system lies in wait and responds only when an incident occurs instead of the proactive approach families try to initiate.
There has to be a better way.
Mazie, has the system gone from one extreme to the other? My wife and I both worked in the field, before and after we met, with people’s children and later adults, me at Clearwater Ranch in Cloverdale and later in Philo. I was psychiatric aide in Friends Hospital in Philadelphia, the country’s first private hospital dedicated to people with mental issues. In the 70’s the big state run facilities were still in operation. Philadelphia State Hospital was only a mile from where we now live. My mother worked there as an occupational therapist and later volunteer coordinator in the 60’s and 70’s. After it closed starting in the late 70’s, as a lot did around the country, some individuals were placed in group homes, but some were seen free but still with untreated issues walking about. Those who went to group homes often did better, but that depended upon their caregivers and the amount of attention they received. Medication became easier to administer after the computer and blister pack method of account. I worked in group homes until covid arrived, convenient for me in my old age too, as the woman I worked with happened to pass the stringent state test to administer meds in the beginning of the pandemic. I was no longer needed as of February 2020. My point is that with the past system it was easier to enable a person to receive treatment, though today I think once a person is placed, if they can stay longer than 30 days in a group situation, they may have success.