News — When we think of a mental-health crisis, we often imagine an unpredictable and intense manifestation of a negative mental state.
And in a clinical setting, that state is assessed primarily from a biomedical perspective, with the emphasis on diagnosing, treating and medicating a person in acute distress.
But what if there were more to the picture?
Emilie Hudson, a doctoral student supervised by Université de Montréal nursing professor Marie-Hélène Goulet, thinks there is. She’s come up with a of mental-health crisis that goes beyond the strictly biomedical.
“While existing definitions seem to recognize the contextual facets of a crisis,” she said, “the concepts are often reduced to individual distress and immediate needs, without considering the social and structural factors that can contribute to, mitigate or help resolve the crisis.”
Basing her definition on an extensive review of the scientific literature on the subject, Goulet takes into account the precipitating factors in a crisis, its attributes and its consequences.
‘Much more than an emergency’
“A mental-health crisis is about much more than the emergency situation where the person has to go to the hospital for a week of acute care,” she said. “It’s about all the structural, social and interpersonal factors that come into play before, during and after the crisis.”
Her analysis looks closely at these dimensions of a crisis. She identifies several aspects:
A divide between care and experience
Hudson also found a divide between-the language of mental-health care and that of people who have experienced a crisis.
Mental-health professionals tend to use clinical terms such as “psychiatric emergency” or “mental-health emergency,” while people who’ve experienced a crisis prefer more metaphorical descriptions such as “collapse,” “vicious circle” or being “in a fog.”
“These findings suggest that we should think about mental health in more holistic and nuanced terms, and consider the whole person,” Hudson said. “This would also reshape the way we deliver care.
“We hope that clinical teams, as well as police and frontline responders, will look at more dimensions in order to intervene in ways better suited to the needs of the people they are dealing with.”
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