On June 18, 2024, Wayne police showed up at the home of John Zook Jr. and shot him six times after he called 911 in the midst of a mental health crisis. Zook’s murder throws into sharp relief what many Americans already know to be true: that our system’s response to mental health issues is deeply carceral and rooted in white supremacy. When the system provides us with no solutions to mental health crises, we have to turn to each other to create new community-based forms of care, free from policing and based on a commitment to honoring the autonomy of those experiencing crisis. Activists, educators, and organizers are building these systems of care around us every day. Here are a few examples of how we can make abolitionist mental health care a reality.
Non-police rapid response
It is not uncommon for cops to be the first on the scene when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis. It almost goes without saying that policing is a deeply racist pillar of white supremacy, and that police are on the forefront of waging class warfare against the poor. When police respond to mental health crises, the result is not only that the individual in crisis gets chewed up and spit out by the jaws of the racist, capitalist system. But also, “mental health crisis response” also becomes justification for increased funding of already-bloated police budgets, allowing cops to further militarize their forces and terrorize poor Black and brown communities.
Police often respond to mental health calls with brutality which, if not lethal, can leave survivors disabled, injured, and further traumatized. Their victims inevitably end up incarcerated, either in a psychiatric ward or local jail. (Black people in the United States are far more likely to be arrested during a mental health crisis than their white counterparts.) Such incarceration illustrates that our response to mental health crises is carried out with the goal of disciplining those whose actions we deem “abnormal” — a concept that is always oriented around white supremacist, classist notions of normality — and removing them from public view.
We need someone to call besides the police when we or someone in our community is experiencing a mental health crisis. Non-police rapid response programs, when operated from a commitment to abolition, offer an alternative. Care-Based Safety in Ypsilanti is one such program. The program offers unarmed rapid response to individuals in distress, whether due to mental health issues or other crises. Care-Based Safety’s commitment to “loving, unarmed support to people directly impacted by structural violence — without police” sets it in radical opposition to the carceral systems that seek to lock up our community members. Rapid response programs like Care Based Safety offer the working class an opportunity to build power in opposition to capitalist, racist institutions like police, prisons, and psych wards. Such organizing offers a path to collective liberation free from the tyranny of policing.
Community based respite for those in crisis
Psychiatric wards might live in the popular imagination as sites of treatment and care, but they too are a part of a carceral system. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are widespread within psych wards. Outside of these worst case scenarios, “business as usual” in psych wards demands that patients are deprived of agency and autonomy over their own bodies. Use of physical and chemical restraints is routine; patients are frequently and legally drugged without consent. The decision to hold patients involuntarily is often arbitrary. Many find themselves receiving “treatment” from professionals who pathologize and disdain them. As a result of these poor conditions, suicide rates are the highest in the 48 hours after individuals leave psychiatric wards. In other words, the trauma of psych wards make the crisis worse, not better.
In response, some organizers are developing “peer respites” as a community-based alternative to psychiatric wards. Peer respites offer safe temporary housing and support for individuals undergoing mental health crises, and are entirely run by other community members who have themselves survived mental illness or trauma. Unlike psych wards, peer respites are completely voluntary and consensual; no one enters against their will and no one is forced to receive “care” they don’t want.
Peer respites can be found across the country; Detroit Peer Respite will be the first of its kind in southeastern Michigan. Through its commitment to providing free trust-based care without relying on police or hospitals, Detroit Peer Respite affirms a commitment to disability justice and abolitionist praxis. This, too, is an example of revolutionary organizing through the creation of self-sustaining organizations which challenge carceral systems’ hegemonic control over mental healthcare. In the case of Detroit Peer Respite, the leadership of Black, trans, mad, and working class anticapitalists puts the mantra “we keep us safe” into action.
Rethink professionalized mental health care
Therapy and counseling are often proposed as an alternative to psychiatric wards. Certainly, mental health professionals commonly offer care, empathy, and evidence-based treatment where psych wards offer incarceration and mistreatment. But because the U.S mental health system is so intertwined with policing, turning to therapists and social workers will not offer us a path out of carceral systems. Licensed mental healthcare providers are mandated reporters, meaning that they are required to contact the police if they suspect a client may be a threat to themselves or others. This means that many people who are suicidal or who engage in self-harm will find themselves in contact with police (and eventually, incarceration in hospitals) as a result of their interactions with mental health professionals.
There is currently a grassroots movement of clinicians advocating for an end to mandated reporting, noting that the practice demands that mental health providers surveil and punish their patients. We also must be wary of any self-proclaimed “abolitionist” solution that advocates for replacing the police with armed social workers— who will inevitably reproduce the racism, brutality, and structural violence of cops. We should counter the tendency of mental health professionals to pathologize and demonize people seeking treatment, especially through the use of diagnoses which are inherently racialized and gendered in ways that are often misogynistic and anti-Black. And we should invest in nonclinical care alongside professional treatment, training and mobilizing peer support workers to help our community members through crises.
Invest in prevention
We must understand that the causes of mental illness are not solely individual but also societal, and invariably the product of racial capitalism. Crises often also arise from homelessness, violence, poverty, and experiences of structural racism, sexism, transphobia, as well as from the general alienation of capitalism. Treating these issues necessarily requires addressing systemic injustice and inequities. The fights for free housing, healthcare, and for abolition of the prison industrial complex are crucial to mental health prevention. Radical antiracist and anticapitalist praxis will always be more impactful than any infographic about depression or anxiety.
Our mental healthcare system seems to be intertwined with carcerality and policing at every turn. But we have the solutions within our communities. If we continue to center abolition, anticapitalism, disability justice, and antiracism in our organizing, we can build a world where we keep each other safe.