A mental health crisis can be a stressful and frightening experience for people living with mental illness and their loved ones, and being able to access effective and compassionate services can make all the difference. In Wisconsin, people experiencing a mental health crisis often have to turn to police, which can escalate into a dangerous situation, or emergency rooms, which can be too busy or overcrowded. In some communities, Madison, for example, people can also contact a 24-hour mental health crisis line and have a mobile crisis response team, CARES, of mental health specialists show up with police to deescalate crises. Expanding access to more crisis services like these across Wisconsin relies, at least in part, on being able to evaluate whether they improve outcomes. To do so, it is crucial to talk to people with lived experience of accessing services during a mental health crisis.
Knowing this, Clinical Associate Professor, Dr. Lynette Studer, recently contributed her extensive experience working with people with serious mental illnesses to an interdisciplinary, community-based research project aimed at talking to people about their mental health crisis experiences. This project originated when a colleague from the UW-Madison School of Nursing, Dr. Rachel Odes, was awarded a one-year grant to engage in interdisciplinary work from the UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) in 2025. The researchers formed a community-based team along with a retired Madison fire chief, who helped initiate Madison’s CARES program, and a person with lived experience in the mental health care system.
The team is currently recruiting people living with mental illness, as well as their family members and loved ones, to engage in focus groups in which they share about their experiences with mental health crisis services. They plan to host five focus groups across Wisconsin. Dr. Studer reports that the recruitment has gone smoothly so far thanks to some help from the UW-Madison School of Nursing, mental health agencies, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Journey Mental Health Center, and community connections that both she and Dr. Odes have. “Both Rachel and I have strong relationships built with partners in the community who support people living with mental illnesses,”she said.
While the team has not yet begun to analyze findings from this research, they hope to highlight a variety of experiences that people have when accessing mental health crisis services, point out gaps and areas for improvement, and contribute to the knowledge base for policy decision makers. Dr. Studer explained, “We are hoping that we might influence discussions and policy about types of crisis response models that have better outcomes versus just calling police. Our hope is that we can illuminate a variety of experiences and provide guidance on systems of care that decrease trauma and increase positive outcomes for family members and people involved in using crisis services.”
The team also hopes that results of this research might support the need for more crisis intervention team training for police and first responders and more discussion about the role that social workers and other mental health care providers can play during mental health crises. This may help more communities be able to implement mobile crisis response programs like CARES.
Dr. Studer reports that the team should have full results and start to see how this research might positively impact the community in about a year. This project may be a first step as a pilot study for a larger future project that would use the unique strengths of this kind of interdisciplinary, community-based research team to investigate these experiences further. As Dr. Studer summarized, “I am appreciative of the collaboration on this project, looking at it from multiple lenses and including multiple stakeholders.”