Crisis Residential Best Practices Handbook

The Crisis Residential Best Practices Handbook is the result of a year-long learning collaborative and workgroup of over 100 Crisis Residential providers across the United States. This monograph highlights the emerging clinical and operational practices utilized by the most conscientious and compassionate providers in the country. 

Travis Atkinson, the primary author of this monograph, will be presenting at the 2019 Crisis Residential Conference in Grand Rapids, MI. 

Beyond Beds: The Vital Role of a Full Continuum of Psychiatric Care
by Dr. Debra Pinals

Beyond Beds contextualizes the deficiencies of our behavioral health crisis system, not as a shortage of private or state psychiatric hospital beds but as a need for a full continuum of psychiatric services, from call centers and mobile outreach teams to crisis stabilization centers and crisis residential units.  

Dr. Debra Pinals, the author of this monograph, will be presenting at the 2019 Crisis Residential Conference in Grand Rapids, MI. 

Mad in America: Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
​​by Robert Whitaker

People with schizophrenia in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects.A haunting, deeply compassionate book-now revised with a new introduction-Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, the meaning of "insanity," and what we value most about the human mind.
(Summary adapted from Amazon)

Soteria: Through Madness to Deliverance
by Loren Mosher, Voyce Hendrix, and Deborah Fort

This is the story of a special time, space, and place where young people diagnosed as "schizophrenic" found a social environment where they were related to, listened to, and understood during their altered states of consciousness. Rarely, and only with consent, did these distressed and distressing persons take "tranquilizers." They lived in a home in a California suburb with non-medical caregivers whose goal was not to "do to" them but to "be with" them.. The place was called "Soteria" (Greek for deliverance), and there, for not much money, most recovered. Although Soteria's approach was swept away by conventional drug-oriented psychiatry, its humanistic orientation still has broad appeal to those who find the mental health mainstream limited in both theory and practice. This book recounts a noble experiment to alleviate oppression and suffering without destroying their victims.

(Summary adapted from Google Books)

Note: Researcher John Bola and and former Soteria staff Yana Jacobs, both important figures from Soteria, spoke at the 2018 Crisis Residential Conference in San Diego.