Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the care-seeking practices of persons experiencing chronic mental health crises and the intervention efforts of co-responding mental health-police officer teams. I ask what therapeutic possibilities are generated and what marginalizing logics are reified by crisis intervention.

Paper long abstract:

A series of high-profile police shootings involving persons with mental illness has forced many Canadians to grapple with the dual public health crises of mental health and racialized police violence (Shoush et al. 2020). The Ontario Mental Health Act provides police with the unique authority to apprehend a person suffering from mental disorder for transport to a healthcare facility where they are legally required to receive a physician’s examination and subsequent psychiatric assessment. In a context where year-long wait times for psychiatric consultation and a lack of community-based infrastructure mire the possibility of treatment in uncertainty, calling the police becomes a care-seeking behaviour for marginalized groups experiencing mental health crises who cannot access healthcare otherwise. However, this disproportionate police contact perpetuates the criminalization of mental illness, sustaining the violence and precarity that punctuate life on the margins.

This paper examines the efforts of Mobile Crisis Intervention Teams (MCITs)—first-responder units that pair mental health clinicians with crisis-trained police officers—to transform the moment of police encounter into an alternative therapeutic space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the form of ride-alongs and interviews with two MCITs in Southern Ontario, I found that the performance of crisis is a strategy enacted by the chronically mentally ill to trouble the seeming certainty of continued marginalization. I argue that the liminal space of crisis intervention serves as an opening to imagine an “otherwise” (Povinelli 2014) that subverts the reality of health inequalities while simultaneously reifying the forms of violence that give rise to them.