Mobile Crisis Mental Health Services
Mobile Crisis Mental Health Services fact sheet (PDF)
Mobile crisis interventions are short-term, intensive mental health services provided during a mental health crisis or emergency. Mobile crisis teams are mental health professionals and practitioners who provide psychiatric services to individuals within their own homes and at other sites outside the traditional clinical setting. Teams provide for a rapid response and will work to assess the individual, resolve crisis situations, and link people to needed services. Mobile crisis services are available throughout the state, and most are 24/7.
- Mobile crisis teams reduce psychiatric hospitalizations.
- Research has shown that mobile crisis services are:
- effective at diverting people in crisis from psychiatric hospitalization,
- effective at linking suicidal individuals discharged from the emergency department to services,
- better than hospitalization at linking people in crisis to outpatient services, and
- effective in finding hard-to-reach individuals.
- These services help the recipient to:
- Cope with immediate stressors and lessen his/her suffering
- Identify and use available resources and recipient’s strengths
- Avoid unnecessary hospitalization and loss of independent living
- Develop action plans
- Begin to return to his/her baseline level of functioning
- In 2016, 60 percent of adults using mobile crisis services were able to remain in their current place of residence and only 4 percent went to a hospital emergency department and 11 percent to an inpatient psychiatric unit after assessment.
- For every dollar invested in a Mobile Crisis program, the state of Minnesota receives $3.90 in benefits associated with reduced hospitalization and crime victimization. This amounts to a net benefit of $1,280 per person.